dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Poitras has been subject to monitoring by the U.S. Government, which she speculates is because of a wire transfer she sent in 2006 to Riyadh al-Adhadh, the Iraqi medical doctor and Sunni political candidate who was the subject of her 2006 documentary My Country, My Country.[25] After completing My Country, My Country, Poitras claims, "I've been placed on the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) watch list" and have been notified by airport security "that my 'threat rating' was the highest the Department of Homeland Security assigns".[26] She says her work has been hampered by constant harassment by border agents during more than three dozen border crossings into and out of the United States. She has been detained for hours and interrogated and agents have seized her computer, cell phone and reporters notes and not returned them for weeks. Once she was threatened with being refused entry back into the United States.[27] In response to a Glenn Greenwald article about this, a group of film directors started a petition to protest the government's actions against her.[28] In April 2012 Poitras was interviewed about surveillance on Democracy Now! and called elected leaders' behavior "shameful".[29][30]

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2015 lawsuit over government harassment Edit

In January 2014 Poitras filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act[31] to learn the reason for being searched, detained and interrogated on multiple occasions.[32] After receiving no response to her FOIA request, Poitras filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice and other security agencies in July 2015.[33] More than a year later, Poitras received 1,000+ pages of material from the federal government. The documents indicate that Poitras's repeated detainments were due to U.S. government suspicion that she had prior knowledge of a 2004 ambush on U.S. troops in Iraq, an allegation Poitras denies.[34]