| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019554)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019554" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2463 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| 66 HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS |
| aware of the threat that [the NSA's] unrestricted, secret abilities pose |
| for democracies," he continued. "I hope you understand that con- |
| tacting you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree |
| to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a |
| waste of your time." Further playing on her concern, he asked her to |
| confirm to him "that no one has ever had a copy of your private key |
| and that it uses a strong pass phrase." Such precautions were neces- |
| sary because "your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per |
| second." That "adversary" was, as she knew from her previous film, |
| the NSA. At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous |
| liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets. She won- |
| dered if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like |
| Assange and Appelbaum, as she noted in her diary. "Is C4 a trap?" |
| she asked herself, referring to her Citizen Four source. "Will he put |
| me in prison?" |
| To elude this "adversary," Snowden stressed to Poitras that she |
| would have to adopt a conspiratorial frame of mind. "If the device |
| you store the private key and enter your pass phrase on has been |
| hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications," he explained. "If |
| you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately impli- |
| cated." If her correspondent could be "immediately implicated," it |
| meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets. So |
| Poitras knew, as early as January 2013, that she was creating an |
| encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets who |
| would be incriminated by providing them to her. |
| The key source for Poitras's previously referred to short video |
| was Binney. Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle |
| NSA secrets. Binney had been an NSA technical director until he |
| had retired in 2001. The NSA's domestic surveillance program that |
| Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poi- |
| tras's film was called Stellarwind. It involved data mining domestic |
| communications and financial transactions that had been authorized |
| by President George W. Bush in 2001 after 9/11 as commander-in- |
| chief under the war powers given to him following the attacks. It |
| indeed led to a major exposé on domestic spying by The New York |
| Times in December 2005. |
| Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents |
| Epst_9780451494566_ 2p_all_r1.z.indd 66 |
| 9/30/16 11:09 AM |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019554 |
|
|
