68 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove.” He even proffered evidence implicating President Barack Obama in illegal surveillance. “There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House. It’s called presidential policy 20,” he wrote to her. It was an eighteen- page directive that Obama had signed four months earlier in Octo- ber 2012. Snowden was offering to reveal to her up-to-date evidence of a surveillance state in America presided over by the president himself. It was what she had been searching for over the past three years. How could she, as an activist filmmaker, resist such a sensa- tional offer?
He further explained to her that he had placed great trust in her discretion. “No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under sus- picion for my actions,” he said.
Poitras must have found it flattering that a total stranger was willing to disclose to her in e-mails what he would not tell even his “most trusted confidante” about his intentions to commit an illicit
© breach of U.S. national security. It also put her under enormous © stress. She noted in her journal that the pressure made her feel as if she were “underwater.” “I am battling with my nervous system. It doesn’t let me rest or sleep. Eye twitches, clenched throat, and now literally waiting to be raided.”
Snowden was also taking an extraordinary risk. After all, he had no way of knowing who else she told about him. She had long been concerned, with good reason, that the U.S. government was out to get her. An unknown person offering to supply her with secret docu- ments could be attempting to entrap her. So Snowden could not pre- clude the possibility that she would consult with others about the offer he was making her. Because her current documentary project included interviews by her with Assange, Appelbaum, and three ex- NSA executives, intelligence services with sophisticated surveillance capabilities might also have taken a professional interest in her com- munications, as Poitras herself had suspected. Even if Snowden was somehow able to use his position as a system administrator at Dell to ascertain that the NSA did not have Poitras under surveillance, he could not be sure that other agencies, such as the Russian and Chi-
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