The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for global intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, specializing in a discipline known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). The NSA is also tasked with the protection of U.S. communications networks and information systems. The NSA relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine. The NSA has roughly 32,000 employees.
James Bamford is an American author, journalist and documentary producer noted for his writing about United States intelligence agencies, especially the National Security Agency (NSA). The New York Times has called him "the nation's premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency" and The New Yorker named him "the NSA's chief chronicler."
Charlie Savage is an American author and newspaper reporter with The New York Times. In 2007, when employed by The Boston Globe, he was a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. He writes about national security legal policy, including presidential power, surveillance, drone strikes, torture, secrecy, leak investigations, military commissions, war powers, and the U.S. war on terrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Dana Louise Priest is an American journalist, writer and teacher. She has worked for nearly 30 years for the Washington Post and became the third John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014. Before becoming a full-time investigative reporter at the Post, Priest specialized in intelligence reporting and wrote many articles on the U.S. "War on terror" and was the newspaper's Pentagon correspondent. In 2006 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting citing "her persistent, painstaking reports on secret "black site" prisons and other controversial features of the government's counter-terrorism campaign." The Washington Post won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, citing the work of reporters Priest and Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille "exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials."
James Andrew Baker is a former American government official at the Department of Justice who served as general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and later served as deputy general counsel at Twitter, Inc. before being fired by Elon Musk in December 2022.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications which were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, described how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."
John Owen Brennan is a former American intelligence officer who served as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from March 2013 to January 2017. He served as chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama, with the title Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President. Previously, he advised Obama on foreign policy and intelligence issues during the 2008 election campaign and presidential transition.
The Daily Beast is an American news website focused on politics, media, and pop culture. Founded in 2008, the website is owned by IAC Inc.
Spencer Ackerman is an American journalist and writer. Focusing primarily on national security, he began his career at The New Republic in 2002 before writing for Wired, The Guardian, and The Daily Beast.
Barton David Gellman is an American author and journalist known for his reports on the September 11 attacks, on Dick Cheney's vice presidency, and on the global surveillance disclosure. Beginning in June 2013, he authored The Washington Post's coverage of the U.S. National Security Agency, based on top secret documents provided to him by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. He published a book for Penguin Press on the rise of the surveillance-industrial state in May 2020, and joined the staff of The Atlantic.
Carol Duhurst Leonnig is an American investigative journalist. She has been a staff writer at The Washington Post since 2000, and was part of a team of national security reporters that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting that revealed the NSA's expanded spying on Americans. Leonnig also received Pulitzer Prizes for National Reporting in 2015 and 2018.
Benjamin Wittes is an American legal journalist. He is editor in chief of Lawfare and senior fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution, where he is the research director in public law, and co-director of the Harvard Law School–Brookings Project on Law and Security. He works principally on issues related to American law and national security. Wittes was number 15 on the Politico 50 of 2017, described as "Bard of the Deep State".
Philip H. Gordon is an American diplomat and international relations scholar. Since March 21, 2022, he has served as Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Earlier in his career, he was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2009–2011) and Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region (2013–2015) during the Obama administration.
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films.
Top Secret America is a series of investigative articles published on the post-9/11 growth of the United States Intelligence Community. The report was first published in The Washington Post on July 19, 2010, by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dana Priest and William Arkin.
Nancy A. Youssef is an American journalist known for her comprehensive and fearless reporting on national security, with a focus on U.S. military operations and the Middle East. As of 2021, she is a national security correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, where she covers military affairs and global defense issues. Youssef has earned significant recognition for her coverage of conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader Arab world, and she has worked for several leading news outlets, including The Daily Beast, BuzzFeed News, and McClatchy Newspapers.
Lisa Oudens Monaco is an American attorney who served as the 39th United States deputy attorney general since 2021. She is also serving as acting United States Attorney General since noon on January 20, 2025, but she is expected to resign from that office later that afternoon. She is a member of the Democratic Party.
Avril Danica Haines is an American lawyer who served as the director of national intelligence in the Biden administration. She is the first woman to serve in this role. Haines previously was Deputy National Security Advisor and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the Obama administration. Prior to her appointment to the CIA, she was Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs in the Office of White House Counsel.
The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State is a non-fiction book by American journalist Shane Harris, published in 2010. It details the rise of surveillance programs in the U.S. Author Harris had previously served as a writer for outfits such as Foreign Policy, National Journal, and The Washingtonian.
The Real Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG) is a data processing and data mining system introduced in 2007 by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and deployed during the American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is able to store, fuse, search and analyze data from numerous sources, from intercepted communications to open source information. It was effective in providing information about Iraqi insurgents who had eluded less comprehensive techniques.
