Okay, I admit, silly headline for a sort-of serious post. Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald has an interesting piece about Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has made two documentaries about various aspects of the War on Terror and is working on a third. Basically, every time she re-enters the country, she gets interrogated for hours and has all her equipment siezed and copied. This requires no search warrant, because even though she has never been accused of a crime, the government, from a legal standpoint, is considering all of her equipment (laptop, hard drive, notes, etc.) to be subject to the same kind of search baggage handlers do on your bags.
In 2004 and 2005, Poitras spent many months in Iraq filming a documentary that, as The New York Times put it in its review, “exposed the emotional toll of occupation on Iraqis and American soldiers alike.” The film, “My Country, My Country,” focused on a Sunni physician and 2005 candidate for the Iraqi Congress as he did things like protest the imprisonment of a 9-year-old boy by the U.S. military. At the time Poitras made this film, Iraqi Sunnis formed the core of the anti-American insurgency and she spent substantial time filming and reporting on the epicenter of that resistance. Poitras’ film was released in 2006 and nominated for the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary.
As Poitras described it to me, this next film will examine the way in which The War on Terror has been imported onto U.S. soil, with a focus on the U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance, its expanding covert domestic NSA activities (including construction of a massive new NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah), its attacks on whistleblowers, and the movement to foster government transparency and to safeguard Internet anonymity.[...]
Since 2006, Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that period she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her. Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke.
She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship.[...]
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