A Washington Post reporter spoke about her Pulitzer Prize-winning research and concerns with the United States intelligence community and domestic counter-terrorism movements at the Fluno Center Tuesday night.

Dana Priest, who spoke as part of an annual University of Wisconsin School of Journalism lecture series, said a main issue that surfaced when conducting interviews concerning the communities was over-secrecy and the increased use of contractors for intelligence.

She added contractors play an increasingly large role in intelligence communities, with nearly 90 percent of the work completed by a handful of contractors in the realm of federal counter-terrorism agencies.

“I [was] starting to see a growth in the number of organizations that hadn’t existed before or growth in the organizations that had existed,” Priest said. “Eventually the buildings came to symbolize something important about the world that we’re entering.”

Priest said that in an interview with then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, his staff was unable to provide the exact number of contractors working in his department because of the amount of subcontractors who would then be hired by contractors.

She also described the intelligence community as a “self-licking ice cream cone,” where those with security clearance passes are able to lock out others from being involved in intelligence issues.

“Definitely, we’re safer,” Priest said. “But it’s not because of this giant thing we’ve created, it’s because within that there are organizations who have learned a huge amount about al-Qaeda, how to track them and how to get information.”

She also criticized a “dragnet approach” to counter-terrorism, which includes the extent of airport security searches and the “see something, say something” theory.

Priest added a more in-depth discussion about threats to national security would find there is currently a threat to security, but also that al-Qaida is “nearly defeated,” with membership numbers as low as 100 to 200 around the world. She added Americans have accepted everything the government is doing is worthwhile, partly due to the lack of an honest discussion about real threat levels.

UW journalism professor Lew Friedland, who introduced Priest, described her as an important journalist who explores issues others do not cover. In an interview with The Badger Herald, he added the data collection she conducted in investigating national security illustrates her commitment to reporting.

“This is what journalism is,” Friedland said. “It’s taking really hard questions and taking really smart people and spending a lot of time staying with it until you get the answers, and that’s why she’s so important.”

Priest also praised the work and memory of New York Times war reporter and UW alumnus Anthony Shadid, who died in Syria on a reporting assignment.

“Shadid is the best model of journalism that I can think of because he tried to get the ground truth, because the ground truth is all around,” she said. “He accomplished that. He told us things other people couldn’t tell us.”

Priest won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her reporting of black site prisons, where unacknowledged government, military and contractual projects take place.

Priest based the lecture on research conducted with fellow Washington Post reporter William Arkin for their novel titled “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.”