13 Quotes by Laura Poitras

The camera doesn’t have to be a barrier,” she said. “It’s a witness.”She never shot herself conducting interviews—it broke one of the tenets of cinéma vérité.

The free software community should be supported more widely. I’m totally in solidarity with what they do.

Those who are experts in the fields of surveillance, privacy, and technology say that there need to be two tracks: a policy track and a technology track. The technology track is encryption. It works and if you want privacy, then you should use it.

It’s not everyday that a whistleblower is actually willing to be identified.

One of the most frightening things, I think, is the capacity for retroactive searching, so you can go back in time and trace who someone is in contact with and where they’ve been.

I don’t speak Arabic – I know a little to get by, but that’s all.

In all my work, I’m interested in understanding big issues through the lives of individuals...

When the most important decisions are made in secret, we lose our ability to check the powers that control.

People are starting to understand that the devices we carry with us reveal our location, who we’re talking to, and all kinds of other information.