James Bamford

James Bamford is an American bestselling author, journalist, and PBS documentary producer. He is widely noted for his writing about the United States intelligence agencies, especially the highly secretive National Security Agency. The New York Times has called him “the nation’s premier journalist on the subject of the National Security Agency.” And in a lengthy profile, The New Yorker referred to him as “the NSA’s chief chronicler.” His most recent book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to The Eavesdropping on America, became a New York Times bestseller and was named by The Washington Post as one of “The Best Books of the Year.” It is the third in a trilogy by Mr. Bamford on the NSA, following The Puzzle Palace (1982) and Body of Secrets (2001), also New York Times bestsellers.

In September 2014 he wrote a cover story for Wired magazine based on his three days in Moscow with fugitive NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In addition, he has been a columnist for Foreign Policy Magazine and has written for the New York Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harpers, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting, the highest honor in the magazine industry, for his writing in Rolling Stone on the war in Iraq. Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Bamford served as the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings where he won a number of journalism awards for his coverage of national security issues. Mr. Bamford holds a Juris Doctor degree, was awarded a Polymer fellowship at Yale Law School, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy as a distinguished visiting professor.