“I haven’t written in over a year for fear these words are not private. That nothing in my life can be kept private.” With these sentences, Laura Poitras began a journal that documented her life as a subject of surveillance by the US government.

The US artist, journalist and film-maker won an Academy award in 2015 for Citizenfour, a documentary showing the Edward Snowden leaks as they unfolded in real time. It turned out that she had been tracked for a decade before that, attracting attention when making her documentary My Country, My Country in 2004. Poitras later discovered she had been placed on a federal government watchlist for filming the aftermath of an Iraqi insurgent attack from the roof of a house in Baghdad. She argues that the footage – lasting eight minutes – did not reveal anything about insurgent or US military positions, but it was enough for her to be marked out. The process reduced her to a nervous wreck, unable to sleep or think straight – as she recorded in her journal, pages from which are on display in a new exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art.

Extracts from that journal also appear in a new book, out on 23 February, revealing the thoughts of artists, novelists and academics on the modern state of mass surveillance. With contributions from Dave Eggers, Ai Weiwei and Snowden himself, it’s being sold as “a ‘how-to’ guide for living in a society that collects extraordinary amounts of information on individuals”. Subtitled A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, the book is as much a first-hand account of being a spying subject as a rumination on privacy and Big Brother.