Washington Post reporter: Here’s why we refused the NSA’s demand to censor the names of PRISM companies

Barton Gellman, the Washington Post reporter who broke the news of the NSA online content collection program PRISM, says the government asked him to suppress the names of the nine companies participating in the program.

Gellman said The Washington Post has a practice of talking to the government before running stories that may impact national security. According to Gellman, there were "certain things" in the PRISM slides that they agreed raised legitimate security concerns. But, he said, “The thing that the government most wanted us to remove was the names of the nine companies. The argument, roughly speaking, was that we will lose cooperation from companies if you expose them in this way. And my reply was ‘that's why we are including them.’ Not in order to cause a certain result, or to get you to lose your cooperation but if the harm that you are describing consists of reputational or business damage to a company because the public doesn't like what it's doing or you're doing, that's the accountability we are supposed to be promoting.” In other words, Gellman believes that it's because the names were released that many of those technology companies started to be vocal advocates of greater transparency about the program.