In a 12-minute video interview recorded last week in Hong Kong and published on Sunday, Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former C.I.A. computer technician who worked until several weeks ago as a private contractor at a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, explained why he leaked classified information about the scope of America’s surveillance efforts to The Guardian and The Washington Post.
The Associated Press later distributed excerpts from the video, which is a conversation with Glenn Greenwald, the lawyer and columnist who blogs for The Guardian “On Security and Liberty,†shot by Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who also took part in The Post’s reporting.
After The Guardian published the video and a long article about Mr. Snowden, The Washington Post followed with a first-person account of the reporter Barton Gellman’s interactions with the same source.
According to Mr. Gellman, his source went to Mr. Greenwald only after he grew concerned that The Post might delay publication and put him in danger. The Guardian columnist took issue with the Post reporter’s claims in a barbed note posted on Twitter.
In a discussion of her work on the Web site of the MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her a fellowship in 2012, Ms. Poitras said that her current film, the third part of a trilogy about “the war on terror, Al Qaeda and the choices we’re making,†deals with “N.S.A. surveillance, Wikileaks, the war on whistle-blowers â€" and it will look at how the war on terror comes home.â€
The filmmaker â€" who also produced a profile of another N.S.A. whistle-blower last year for The Times â€" added: “My work is absolutely completely dependent on the people who open their lives to me and take huge risks in doing so.â€
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