Barton Gellman

Barton Gellman is a critically honored journalist and author. His professional distinctions include two Pulitzer Prizes (individual and team), the George Polk Award, Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting and two Emmy awards for a PBS Frontline documentary.

His books include the best-selling Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, a New York Times Best Book of 2008 and winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power and Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State.

The dilemmas of secrecy, security, privacy, and surveillance have absorbed Gellman through much of his career. He was one of three journalists who interviewed and received documents from Edward Snowden in the late spring of 2013. Since then he has written stories revealing the NSA’s PRISM program, a secret history of warrantless eavesdropping, the “black” intelligence budget, and other previously unknown features of post-9/11 surveillance. He has also said he holds back some of what he learns.

Gellman has given public lectures and taught a Princeton undergraduate seminar on national security secrecy, and his speaking schedule has brought him to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Duke, and the Naval Academy. He has appeared on Face the Nation and Meet the Press, and is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

Gellman is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a staff writer for The Atlantic and a visiting lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has also served as contributing editor-at-large of Time magazine and spent 21 years at The Washington Post as a legal, military, diplomatic, foreign, and special projects correspondent.

Gellman graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and earned a masters degree in politics at University College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar.