Guess what happens to an Award-winning filmmaker who produces films about government...

Miscellaneous General
1

Felt this deserved its own thread:

Documentary filmmaker tired of the government jacking her stuff

04.10.12

Written by Vince Mancini

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.[…]

It gets worse…Read more: http://filmdrunk.uproxx.com/2012/04/documentary-filmmaker-tired-of-the-gub-ment-jacking-her-stuff

2

so sad.

cant do nothin bout it.

call the aclu

3

what a bunch of crap. Guess I know what movie’s r going to the top of my to-watch list…

4

On the other hand: dropbox, google drive, icloud…

5

On the other hand…

“If you can hide a 2 terrabyte drive and take a 6 hour journey to get it from A to B, your bandwidth is 388 Megabits per second. Try and get that on your cable modem or ADSL link.”

Plus, “few if any cloud services are offering that encrypted connection with rival providers.” Plus, “Enterprise security is only as good as the least reliable partner, department, or vendor. Can you trust your data to your service provider?” Plus, “Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.”

Plus, not having any data on the laptops, cameras, cellphones, notebooks, journals, credit card receipts, etc. is not going to stop her from getting detained, and all that stuff confiscated anyway.

…unless you’re suggesting all that equipment and paraphernalia can be transported through flipping iCloud.

6

I’m not excusing the violence, just throwing out ideas. She could save stuff to SSDs and mail them. Mail other equipment. She could downsize. Have someone else carry some of the equipment across the border. She’s probably going to get caught up in any case, but there have to be ways to minimize the impact.

If the really are confiscating and keeping her equipment, and mailing isn’t an option, it would seem more cost effective to just leave it and buy new equipment in the next country. In the US, she can upload all her footage through Google Fiber if she’s absolutely desperate to upload in a matter of minutes or hours instead of a matter of tens of hours.