Meet the Keyser Soze Behind the Snowden Saga

I keep calling Poitras the Keyser Soze of the story, because she’s at once completely invisible and yet ubiquitous,” Greenwald [said], referring to the character in “The Usual Suspects” played by Kevin Spacey, a mastermind masquerading as a nobody, told Maass.

In a New York Times piece written by investigative reporter Peter Maass, who is working on a book about surveillance and privacy, he spoke with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and through encrypted email, Edward Snowden.

Throughout the feature Laura Poitras emerges not only as a central figure in making the Snowden revelations have the maximum global impact but she, along with Glenn Greenwald are profiled as a new model of citizen journalists operating outside the norms of traditional media.

Poitras and Greenwald are an especially dramatic example of what outsider reporting looks like in 2013. They do not work in a newsroom, and they personally want to be in control of what gets published and when. When The Guardian didn’t move as quickly as they wanted with the first article on Verizon, Greenwald discussed taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another publication. He also considered creating a Web site on which they would publish everything, which he planned to call NSADisclosures. In the end, The Guardian moved ahead with their articles. But Poitras and Greenwald have created their own publishing network as well, placing articles with other outlets in Germany and Brazil and planning more for the future. They have not shared the full set of documents with anyone.

“We are in partnership with news organizations, but we feel our primary responsibility is to the risk the source took and to the public interest of the information he has provided,” Poitras said. “Further down on the list would be any particular news organization.”

Other revelations:

The former government contractor told Maass that he believes Poitras and Greenwald were "annoyed" after discovering how young he is when the three met in June in Hong Kong.

"I think they were annoyed that I was younger than they expected, and I was annoyed they had arrived too early, which complicated the initial verification. As soon as we were behind close doors, however, I think everyone was reassured by the obsessive attention to precaution and bona fides. I was particularly impressed by Glenn’s ability to operate without sleep for days at a time."

When Greenwald began conversing with Snowden in April after he had met with Poitras in New York and installed encryption software on his computer. (Poitras began speaking with Snowden in January, and he got a job as a NSA contractor for Booz Allen in March.)

At that point, Maas writes, their work "was organized like an intelligence operation, with Poitras as the mastermind."

Greenwald said of Poitras: "None of this would have happened with anything near the efficacy and impact it did, had she not been working with me in every sense and really taking the lead in coordinating most of it.”

Poitras wouldn’t say when Snowden began sending her documents, but she initially received many more than Greenwald (who received about 20).

Maass has written a fascinating piece and you can check it out here.

http://www.nytimes.com/...