5 - Trouble Makers: Laura Poitras and the Problem of Dissent

Summary

Trouble in transit, got through the roadblock

We blended in with the crowd

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines

I know that ain't allowed

Talking Heads

Most of us can say with some justice that we were good workmen. Is it equally true to say that we were good citizens?

Marc Bloch

All change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble makers, no dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

A. J. P. Taylor

Laura Poitras is a trouble maker. She is also a filmmaker. She has the unusual distinction of achieving professional recognition in both fields. As the primary contact and conduit for the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the subject of her latest documentary, Citizenfour (2014), her status as trouble maker is inextricably intertwined with her status as filmmaker: her preoccupations or vocations have merged. For her recent work she has been garlanded with a MacArthur Fellowship, a George Polk Award for national security reporting, and a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2016 she has an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; to be more precise, ‘an installation of immersive environments using materials, footage and information that builds on themes she has been exploring in her film making, including NSA [National Security Agency] surveillance and post-9/ 11 America’. Poitras has her finger on the pulse of post-9/ 11 America. The Academy Award was only a matter of time. The Academy was bold – she won for Citizenfour.

She had been nominated before, for My Country, My Country (2006), the best documentary yet made about the Iraq War. As if to coincide with that nomination, she received another. She was placed on a terrorist watch list by the United States government. The central watch list is called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE). It is kept by the National Counterterrorism Center; the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and other members of the intelligence community can all nominate individuals to be added to it. Evidently there are at least two subsidiary lists relating to air travel: a no-fly list, of those who are not allowed to fly into or out of the country, and a selectee list, of those who are earmarked for additional inspection and interrogation.