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For six months, The Washington Post was on the leading edge of reporting on the National Security Agency and the documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden. It began by becoming the first news outlet to disclose PRISM, a massive program to vacuum up e-mails, documents and other electronic records from the largest U.S. Internet companies. Later, The Post revealed the NSA's repeated violations of its own privacy rules; examined the workings of the secretive federal court overseeing surveillance activities; exposed the NSA's clandestine collection of millions of e-mail address books globally; and broke the news that the agency was gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world. The Post shattered the decades-long secrecy surround the intelligence community's “black budget,” publishing an in-depth story based on the budget summary for fiscal 2013 and disclosing unprecedented details about spending levels in graphics in print and online. At the end of the year, reporter Bart Gellman conducted the first in-person interview with Snowden in Russia.