FRESH AIR
Since the beginning of June, Barton Gellman has been reporting on classified intelligence documents given to him by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor. As a result of the Snowden leaks, Gellman and reporter Laura Poitras of the PRISM program, which mines data from nine U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook. Gellman, who has been writing for The Washington Post, also that the NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress expanded the agency’s powers in 2008. He that the U.S. has conducted cyber-operations against computer networks in foreign countries — including Iran, Russia, China and North Korea — and on the “black budget” used to fund secret programs in America’s 16 spy agencies. Gellman is in the process of writing a book on the expansion of government surveillance since the Sept. 11 attacks 12 years ago. He shared a Pulitzer Prize with the rest of The Washington Post’s staff in 2002 for reporting after Sept. 11, and won another Pulitzer with Jo Becker in 2008 for their series of articles on Vice President Dick Cheney. That series became the basis of Gellman’s best-selling book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. Gellman is also a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. He joins Fresh Air’s Terry Gross to discuss working with Edward Snowden and the effectiveness of post-Sept. 11 surveillance systems. MORE