Shane Harris is an award-winning author and magazine journalist. His critically-acclaimed book The Watchers tells the story of five men who played central roles in the creation of a vast national security apparatus and the rise of surveillance in America. (Penguin Press, 2010). The Watchers won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Economist named it one of the best books of 2010. Shane is the winner of the 2010 Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. He has four times been named a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, which honor the best journalists in America under the age of 35. He is currently senior writer at The Washingtonian magazine. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal,  Slate, The Daily Beast, TheAtlantic.com, National Journal, The Washington Post, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings. He has provided analysis and commentary for CNN, the BBC, The History Channel, NPR, and many local public radio stations.

Prior to joining Washingtonian, in 2010, Shane was a staff correspondent for National Journal for five years. Before that post, he was the technology editor and a staff correspondent at Government Executive magazine. Shane also was the managing editor for Movieline magazine in Los Angeles. He began his journalism career in 1999, as the research coordinator and a writer for Governing magazine in Washington.

Shane graduated from Wake Forest University with a B.A. in Politics in 1998. He is also a fiction writer. While living in Los Angeles, he helped found and served as the artistic director of a sketch comedy troupe. Shane is a Sundance Film Festival screenwriting finalist.