The Guardian, Washington Post Win Pulitzer Prize for NSA Reporting

The Washington Post and the Guardian snagged the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service on Monday after blowing the lid off of the National Security Agency's widespread spying on ordinary American citizens last year.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden met withGlenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong after he downloaded approximately 1.7 million secret NSA files.

The stories, first published last June, shed light on a large surveillance program in which the NSA spied on telephone calls as well as atop-secret program known as PRISM, which collects foreign communications traffic from the servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies.Since the information went public, several large Internet companies, like Google, have beefed up their own security measures to protect users from NSA-like spying.

Snowden has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but a winner will not be announced until October.