How Laura Poitras….

How Laura Poitras….

This article initially started out talking about Laura exchanging emails with someone who had top secret information that the government had been listening into peoples calls and reading peoples emails. I started out not understanding what I was reading, but then the author takes you back in time and it all starts to make sense.

            It all starts off with Laura Poitras background – how she is a documentary maker and how she is interested in government surveillance. She traveled to Iraq where she was accused of knowing an attack was going to occur before it actually did. This however was false – but ever since then she was put on watch and the no flight list. Laura took extensive precautions – clearing information off of her phone, decrypting information on her computer, all so the government wouldn’t be able to know what she was up to.

            Soon she was contact by Snowden, who is a man in his late twenties, who said he knew lots of information about the government’s surveillance on America. She blindingly trusted him and got Greenwald involved as well. The three of them became a team and precociously carried forth with their plans. However they were discovered and their plans were stopped in their tracks. Poitras and Greenwald left Hong Kong (where the three of them had been meeting) and got out of the thick of the action. As for Snowden he went into hiding for he was the most wanted man alive.

            This article was very interesting to read. Honestly, when I usually see an article this long I will just skim it and not read all of it, but for this article I read intently the whole time. It was crazy to learn about some of these things. Of course I knew that the government was allowed to listen into calls and such, but I didn’t know to what extent they went too.