‘Citizenfour’ director Laura Poitras at this year’s New York Film Festival

Laura Poitras is calling from her cell phone, which means that there’s a chance the NSA is collecting data about our call, or perhaps even listening in on our conversation. Of course, it was her groundbreaking reporting that helped expose the fact that the U.S. government could be tapping into anyone’s phone calls, but the threat is certainly heightened any time the 52-year-old documentarian is involved.

Poitras is the director of the upcoming film Citizenfour,which provides a remarkable window into the process by which a former NSA contractor named Edward Snowden leaked a motherlode of top-secret documents detailing the government’s massive spying on its own citizens’ phone data and web browsing.

Snowden first contacted Poitras in early 2013, using a pseudonym that the director borrowed for the title of the film. He promised that he had stunning evidence of the domestic spying program’s reach, prompting months of encrypted emails. Ultimately, Poitras enlisted journalist Glenn Greenwald and flew with him to Hong Kong, where they met Snowden in a hotel room to look over the story he had promised.

The 29-year-old delivered, and the filmmaker and journalist worked with Snowden for a week to prepare the bombshell documents into stories that would shock the world.

Poitras, already on a government watch list thanks to previous films that included 2010’s The Oath and 2003’s Flag Wars, has become an outspoken privacy advocate. She hopes that Citizenfour — opening in selected theaters on Oct. 24 —will open America’ eyes about what its government is doing.

The filmmaker spoke with Yahoo Movies earlier this week about the experience of making Citizenfour, the status of Edward Snowden, and the American attitude toward government snooping.

What are the chances that we’re being sucked up by the vast machine of the NSA?

Right now, I happen to be calling from my personal cell phone, which probably increases the likelihood. But I am calling from within the United States. If I was in Berlin [where she now resides], on my phone, the chances are pretty high.

You’ve flown to New York this year without a problem. Do you think it’s because you now have a high profile, and it’d be more trouble than it’s worth for the feds to stop you?

In my case, I was on this watch list for years, I assume I’m still on it even though they don’t stop me anymore. But what was happening with that, was they’d question me as to where I’d been, and photocopy my notes. For them to do that now, would be a story. Either they have to be ready with subpoenas or something — or worse — or they just have to let us go, because there would be some blowback if they started trying to photocopy my notebooks now.

If Snowden had tried to remain anonymous, I think the likelihood of us being subpoenaed would have gone up substantially. But the fact that he’s come out and said, “Hey, this is who I am and this is why I did it,” puts the government in a more awkward position if they wanted to try to subpoena us.

Did the government know that Snowden had left right away? What was the danger at that moment since the government didn’t yet know that he was the leaker?

I think there was a lot [of danger]. We know that they pay attention to flight manifests and typically, when you work for these agencies — for the NSA or other intelligence agencies — you’re supposed to request permission for international travel, which didn’t happen in this case. So I assume it was known that he had traveled, and I don’t know if they started to question. But it was clear, on the day that Glenn [Greenwald] published the Verizon story [his initial story in the U.K.’s Guardian on NSA’s domestic spying], was the day Lindsay Mills [Snowden’s girlfriend] got a knock on her door from the NSA asking where he is, and my guess is that it wasn’t the Verizon story that triggered that.

If you have one person who works for the NSA getting on a plane to Hong Kong, and you have three journalists doing it three days later, I think there was some questioning, some speculation about why we were all in the same place.

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