| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020234)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020234" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 3460 |
| 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" |
| --- |
| |
| 82 |
| her long-time concerns about being watched by the government. "Your victimization by the NSA |
| system means that you are well aware of the threat that [the NSA's] unrestricted, secret abilities |
| pose for democracies," he continued. "I hope you understand that contacting 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 heightening her concern that she was under surveillance, 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 passphrase." Such precautions were necessary 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. |
| To elude this "adversary," Snowden stressed to her that she would have to adopt a |
| conspiratorial set of mind. "If the device you store the private key and enter your passphrase on |
| has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications," he explained. "If you publish the |
| source material, I will likely be immediately implicated." 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 and who would be incriminated by providing them to her. |
| The key source for Poitras' previously-referred to short video was William Binney. Like her |
| new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets. Binney had been a 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 Poitras' film was called "Stellar Wind." It |
| indeed led to a major expose of domestic spying by the New York Times in December 2005. After |
| President Bush's own Justice Department then held that such surveillance was illegal, Congress |
| passed a revision of the Patriot Act in 2007 that effectively legalize the "Stellar Wind" |
| surveillance program on condition that the NSA obtain a FISA warrant for it that would be |
| periodically reviewed by the Department of Justice. |
| Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents to back up the charges he made |
| about Stellar Wind. He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that |
| matter, US anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was |
| not a law breaker. But her new source, Snowden, was willing to do what Binney (and other |
| insiders) had refused to do. He was offering in these emails to provide her with secret |
| government documents even though it would implicate him as an outlaw. To further whet her |
| appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations |
| that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney's 2001 disclosures were still |
| relevant to her cause. "What you know as Stellar Wind has grown" he wrote her. In fact, as |
| Snowden knew from the draft Inspector-General report he stole in 2012 that Stellar Wind been |
| terminated in 2011 by the NSA for budgetary reasons. He continued: "The expanded special |
| source operations that took over Stellar Wind's share of the pie have spread all over the world to |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020234 |
|
|
