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64 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS ing with several people who were all being targeted by the [U.S.] government.” Many of the people she was filming, including Appel- baum, Assange, Binney, and the former NSA employee Thomas Drake, could attract interest by U.S. or foreign intelligence services. Snowden asked Poitras to take out a new enciphering key to use exclusively for her liaison with him. It provided them both with an extra layer of protection from any surveillance by law enforcement. Presumably, she accommodated his requests because she anticipated that the anonymous person would use this encrypted channel to send her highly sensitive material. On January 23, Snowden wrote to Poitras under yet another alias. This time he called himself Citizen Four. He wrote, “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word.” He then said falsely, “I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.” She had no way of knowing at this “stage” that despite giving her his “word,” he was not who he claimed to be. He was not a “government employee,” he was not a “senior” official, and he was not a member of the “intelligence community” (which is composed of the intel- ) ligence services of the U.S. government). He would later also claim © to her that he had been “a senior adviser to the CIA” and “a senior adviser to the DIA.” That was untrue, too. In January 2013, he was merely a contract employee of Dell’s working as a computer techni- cian at the NSA base in Hawaii. Snowden told her in his initial e-mail that he was well acquainted with her career as an anti-surveillance activist. He said that he had read Greenwald’s account in Salon that past April, a blog in which Greenwald detailed the forty times in which Poitras was searched by U.S. authorities. The story also said that Poitras believed she was on a special watch list and under constant U.S. government surveillance. She had come under such scrutiny by U.S. authorities, it turned out, because of her documentary about American military abuses of civil- ians in Iraq in 2006, titled My Country, My Country. While filming it, she was at a place close to an insurgent ambush of U.S. troops in Iraq. Her presence at the ambush site led army intelligence officers to suspect (without any evidence) that she might have been tipped off by the insurgents. She firmly denied the charge, and the govern- ment never substantiated it. Even so, because of this incident, since | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 64 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019552