New profile of Snowden’s trusted ally illustrates importance of opsec

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Edward Snowden first bonded with Laura Poitras—the filmmaker and one of the two journalists who first exposed his leaks from the National Security Agency (NSA)—when Snowden “discovered Laura was more suspicious of me than I was of her, and I’m famously paranoid.” That revelation comes from a new profile of Poitras in the New York Times Magazine published on Tuesday.

In a rare interview mediated by Poitras, the Times also spoke with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to gain insight into the veteran filmmaker.

“The combination of her experience and her exacting focus on detail and process gave her a natural talent for security, and that’s a refreshing trait to discover in someone who is likely to come under intense scrutiny in the future, as normally one would have to work very hard to get them to take the risks seriously,” Snowden said.

“With that putting me at ease, it became easier to open up without fearing the invested trust would be mishandled, and I think it’s the only way she ever managed to get me on camera. I personally hate cameras and being recorded, but at some point in the working process, I realized I was unconsciously trusting her not to hang me even with my naturally unconsidered remarks. She’s good.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/new-profile-of-snowdens-trusted-ally-illustrates-importance-of-opsec/

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1. How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets

This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key — allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key — but she didn’t think much would come of it.

The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,” the stranger wrote.

Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, “This I can prove.”

Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. “I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,” she told me last month. “It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html