The winning theme indicated on this year's Pulitzer Prize entries was discovery. On Monday, the reports on the sweeping surveillance efforts of the US government helped land The Washington Post and The Guardian a Pulitzer for public service, CBS News said. The award-winning reports were based on thousands of classified documents that were obtained by former government contractor Edward Snowden. The Pulitzer is considered to be the highest honor an American journalist could possibly get.
The Snowden leaks have angered not only the American public, but foreign allies as well when it was revealed that the extent of the US government's surveillance also reached other countries it considered friendly with. The leaks have called for investigations on the current policies of the National Security Agency, of whom purportedly carried out the surveillance programs for years.
Wired said in a news feature that Snowden was super secretive with his revelations to Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian, whom the former first emailed about the leaks. Aside from using using email encryption software called PGP for all of their communications, Snowden also urged Greenwald and documentary film maker Laura Poitras, who is also a collaborator and Pulitzer prize winner, to use a computer-in-a-box technology called Tails.
According to Wired, Tails is an version of a Linux operating system that has been optimized for users who wishes to be anonymous on the Web. The tool comes with several privacy and encryption tools, which include an application that keeps a user's Internet traffic at lower than federal surveillance levels called Tor.
The development team at Tails, who are also anonymous, are also like Snowden, dislike the fact the contribution of authorities and even companies to the rapid erosion of online privacy. The group was quoted as saying, "The masters of today's Internet, namely the marketing giants like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, and the spying agencies, really want our lives to be more and more transparent online, and this is only for their own benefit," the group says. "So trying to counterbalance this tendency seems like a logical position for people developing an operating system that defends privacy and anonymity online."
Barton Gellman for the Washington Post, who also received a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Snowden leak, praised Tails for its easy-to-use took. "Tails puts the essential tools in one place, with a design that makes it hard to screw them up. I could not have talked to Edward Snowden without this kind of protection. I wish I'd had it years ago."
