Laura’s concerns, I soon realized, were anything but idle paranoia. She had been interrogated by US Customs and Border Patrol agents on more than forty occasions when traveling internationally. The harassment began in 2006, months after My Country, My Country was released. To create that film, Laura had spent eight months working alone in Iraq, chronicling the daily struggles of a doctor who was running a free clinic in Baghdad while also campaigning for a seat in the national assembly. On one particularly violent day, American soldiers spotted Laura filming from a rooftop. Their commander filed a report about her, speculating she’d known in advance about a fatal ambush and showed up to record it. That suggestion was grotesque, not to mention unfounded. Army investigators had “no credible evidence” to support it, a lawsuit revealed years later. Still, the report could have been enough to land her on a terrorist watchlist.
Whatever the government’s suspicions, Laura had no way of knowing — or contesting — them. The experience was maddening. On some occasions agents detained her at the airport for more than three hours. Sometimes they temporarily confiscated and photocopied her notebooks. Once, they took away her computer. On April 6, 2012, after we had known each other for about four months, Laura was grilled at Newark Liberty International Airport. She was coming home from London, where she’d been filming WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his team for a documentary later titled Risk. As always, following her lawyer’s instructions, she took notes. This time, a federal agent declared her pen was a potential weapon. He threatened to handcuff her if she kept using it. When she offered to write with crayons instead, he said no.
When I heard about what happened, I was on a reporting trip in the Rust Belt, en route home from the Monongahela Valley. I emailed her to commiserate: “Oh man, your re-entry sounds bad.” She wrote back the next morning. By then, she’d recovered her sense of levity. “Oh yeah, it was really fun,” she snarked. “Actually quite humorous, if it weren’t so outrageous.”
I drove through the night, reached Manhattan in the early morning hours, and slept. When I woke up, there was a new email from Laura. She’d pasted into it a message from the journalist Glenn Greenwald, whom she’d contacted about her troubles. He’d written:
You’re a documentarian and journalist and the idea that you are routinely questioned, detained and have your stuff copied every time you re-enter the US is one of the true untold travesties — I will do everything possible to make sure it gets the attention it deserves.
Laura was reluctant to go on the record with Greenwald, even though she’d already reached out to him. She’s an intensely private person. Besides, she didn’t want the whole world to know she’d been filming the WikiLeaks crew. She had to protect her sources. “Do you [see] downsides in going public?” she asked me in an email.
“My instant reaction is yes, go public! Cockroaches are repelled by light,” I wrote back. Hours later, I went to visit her in person and implored her to speak out.
Salon ran an article the next day under the headline “US Filmmaker Repeatedly Detained at Border.” In it, Greenwald wrote:
It’s hard to overstate how oppressive it is for the US government to be able to target journalists, filmmakers and activists and, without a shred of suspicion of wrongdoing, learn the most private and intimate details about them and their work … The ongoing, and escalating, treatment of Laura Poitras is a testament to how severe that abuse is.
At her request, Greenwald didn’t write that Laura had been filming with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team. (In all likelihood, government intelligence agencies knew about this, which could explain why the border agents had been so aggressive.) After his story was published, the detentions stopped.
By one measure, Laura and I were a perfect match. We’re both workaholics; we often debated who put in longer hours. I used her as a sounding board for projects, and she did the same with me. In early August, she visited the solar-powered off-the-grid home I’d built in Northern California, overlooking the Pacific. The place is very remote, with the nearest utility lines some three miles away and the closest neighbor a half mile (as the spotted owl flies) across a canyon. We worked through the days and nights. I was finishing a book. Laura was editing The Program, a short documentary about William Binney, the NSA-veteran-turned-whistleblower. After a thirty-two-year career with the agency, Binney had retired in disgust following 9/11. That’s when, as he explained in the film, officials began repurposing ThinThread, a social-graphing program he’d built for use overseas, to spy on ordinary Americans instead.
“This is something the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo would have loved to have had about their populations,” Binney soberly told the camera. “Just because we call ourselves a democracy doesn’t mean we will stay that way. That’s the real danger.”
Though no charges were ever brought against Binney, a dozen rifle-toting FBI agents raided his home in 2007. One pointed a weapon at him as he stood naked in the shower.
After the New York Times published The Program in late August, Laura was ready to start editing her WikiLeaks documentary. This time, extra precautions would be necessary to protect her source material. Her detentions by border officials were still fresh in her mind, and the US government had opened a secret grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks two years earlier. So Laura relocated to Berlin.
Meanwhile, she was contracting out a major renovation of her New York loft. Having been a professional chef in the Bay Area before she made her first film, Flag Wars, she was especially eager to have a working kitchen. Because I’d built and remodeled homes, she asked me for advice. I offered suggestions on such things as countertop materials (she chose concrete).
We remained connected, albeit with an ocean between us. Distance is hard on any two people who are involved. But ours was far from what most people typically consider a relationship. We were both under substantial stress with our work. That October, she came home after winning a MacArthur Fellowship. Her flat was still without heat, and it had a leaking bathroom pipe, which I tried (but failed) to fix. Then she flew back to Berlin.
I wouldn’t see her for the rest of the year. But anytime I emailed, no matter the hour in Berlin — even at three or four in the morning — she answered promptly. This insomnia was chronicled in a journal she’d been keeping, which was later excerpted in Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living under Total Surveillance, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
On December 15, 2012, Laura wrote: “If only I could sleep I’d be happy in Berlin.”
A month later, she noted in the journal: “Just received email from a potential source in the intelligence community. Is it a trap, is he crazy, or is this something real?”
Little more than a week after making that entry, Laura returned to the United States to shoot footage of the NSA’s Utah Data Center, which was still under construction. According to the journalist James Bamford, the facility, which would begin operations two years later, had been designed as a repository for
all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cellphone calls, and internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
With these matters on her mind, Laura flew back to New York, where she told me how she’d been approached by a mysterious source who was eager to communicate with her. “Could it be a setup?” she asked. It could. Yet she chose to keep the channel open. We adopted a code for talking about the issue, pretending to discuss the ongoing renovation of her loft. On the last day