Dana Priest: ‘They all know each other’

Dana Priest is a leading Washington Post investigative reporter on national security who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her reporting on America’s overseas counterterrorism operations and the CIA’s network of secret prisons.

Priest is the author of two books, including her most recent work Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State .

In an investigative series for the Washington Post, also titled Top Secret America , Priest and colleague, reporter William M Arkin, expose how national security has mushroomed since 9/11 and the intelligence community has largely become the domain of private contractors.

Priest joined Empire as a guest panelist to discuss whether or not surveillance saves lives, who is watching the watchers, how secrecy has become big business, and why the metadata collected through NSA surveillance may be disastrous in the hands of future administrations.