Shane Harris Keynote Speaker

Shane Harris is an award-winning journalist and author who has written about security, intelligence, and foreign policy for more than two decades.

He is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes extensively about U.S. national security, the Trump administration, and the United States’ increasingly fragile relationships with its global allies. He co-wrote the publication’s “Signalgate” stories, after the White House national security adviser inadvertently added a journalist to a text thread about pending U.S. military strikes.

Previously, Shane was a staff writer at The Washington Post where he was part of the team that won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was also a Pulitzer finalist for coverage of the murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Shane has also been a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy, among other publications.

Shane began covering the U.S. intelligence community immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. He has broken countless stories and taken readers into the secret worlds of spies, hackers, and world leaders.

He is the author of two books: The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State and @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex. The Watchers won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and was named one of the best books of the year by The Economist. He has also shared a George Polk Award and won the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense.

Shane is also a documentary filmmaker and veteran podcaster. In 2023, he co-reported “The Discord Leaks” with PBS Frontline, about an Air National Guardsman who leaked hundreds of classified U.S. intelligence documents to an online gaming platform. The film was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding investigative news coverage.

Shane has hosted two podcasts, “Rational Security” and “Chatter.” His single-episode podcast for The Washington Post about a secret recipe for candied bacon (of all things) and its fascinating connection to the early days of the CIA won a James Beard Media Award.

Shane is a frequent guest on national and international TV and radio programs. He graduated in 1998 with a BA in Politics from Wake Forest University, where he also wrote and directed plays and was a member of a campus comedy troupe now entering its third decade. He lives with his husband in Washington, DC.