Barton Gellman
"The Snowden Effect"
Thursday, September 24
LOEB AUDITORIUM: 6 - 7 PM
Three years after Edward Snowden began reaching out to journalists, Barton Gellman among them, the cascading effects of his leak remain impressive. Gellman offers a fresh account of the disclosures and their aftershocks, drawing upon hundreds of hours of work with the classified NSA archive and scores of hours of interviews with Snowden. How is the balance of power changing in the legal, political and technological struggle to define the boundaries of electronic privacy?
Bio: Barton Gellman is author of the bestselling Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation and Lecturer and Author in Residence at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. In 2013 and 2014, after receiving a cache of classified documents from Edward Snowden, Gellman returned to The Washington Post to write about the National Security Agency disclosures. He had left the paper to in 2010 after tours covering diplomacy, the Middle East, the Pentagon and legal affairs.
Gellman led teams that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the NSA stories and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series on Vice President Cheney. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for coverage of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Other professional honors include two George Polk Awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Angler was a New York Times Best Book of 2008 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Spring Creek Productions ("Recount," "Blood Diamond") is developing the book for a feature film. Gellman graduated with highest honors from Princeton University and earned a master's degree in politics at University College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He is also author of Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power. Gellman lives in New York City with partner Dafna Linzer and four children: Abigail, Michael, Lily, and Benjamin.