End to the Constitution??

The Justice Department’s secret seizure of months’ worth of Associated Press reporters’ private telephone records is a slap in the face to a free press — and a free people.

But it’s part of both a larger assault on the traditional function of the media by the Obama administration, as well as a broader government intrusion into the privacy of U.S. citizens.

Under Obama, the government has pursued six cases against individuals suspected of handing over classified information, more than under all previous presidents combined, as the Associated Press pointed out. Meanwhile, disturbing news about the government’s ability and willingness to use electronic surveillance on Americans has continued to mount.

It adds up to a chilling effect on citizens, journalists and potential whistleblowers, who rightly now must think twice about offering information concerning government misdeeds or secrets. That comes at an incredibly high cost for society.

Whatever you think of the modern press — and I’ve got plenty of problems with it myself — it serves a critical function in bringing government wrongdoing out into the open. It holds officials, police and the military accountable for their actions in a way that nothing else can.

It’s in our national interest to protect the media’s use of confidential sources, because too often people can only be honest and open about such matters under the cloak of anonymity.

The Justice Department hasn’t provided details about its investigation that ensnared the Associated Press, but it appears to be related to a story the news wire published in May 2012 revealing the Central Intelligence Agency successfully thwarted an al-Qaida plot to blow up a United States-bound airliner.

The Justice Department seems to have obtained records of outgoing calls for the work, personal and cell phone numbers of a handful of Associated Press reporters, including the ones involved in that story. The records also included calls coming from the general AP office numbers in several cities. So far, it doesn’t seem the conversations themselves were monitored.

 

The Justice Department’s own rules require that subpoenas for the telephone records of journalists be as narrowly drawn as possible, and sought only after all other possibilities for finding the information it’s seeking are exhausted. The first clearly didn’t happen; the details concerning the second part are still unclear.

 

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” wrote Associated Press Chief Executive Gary Pruitt in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by the A.P. during a two-month period, provide a road map to A.P.’s news gathering operations, and disclose information about A.P.’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.”

 

Even if you’re not outraged by the government’s latest intrusion into the privacy of the press, consider its ongoing intrusions into your own.

In the years since the terrorist attack of 9/11, the United States has edged ever closer to a surveillance state, as the National Security Agency engaged in warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropped in secret rooms at the switching centers of AT&T and others.

Using open records requests, the ACLU last year found that police departments routinely track personal cell phones, often without warrants. A subsequent congressional inquiry found that cellular carriers responded to at least 1.3 million such requests for subscriber records last year, a notable increase based on carriers that provided figures from earlier years.

Also in 2012, Wired reported that the NSA is building a massive, $2 billion data center in Utah to mine and analyze vast amounts of personal data and communications crisscrossing the Internet.
“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private e-mails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter,’ ” the magazine reported. “It is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”

A former FBI counterterrorism agent divulged even more shocking information earlier this month.
Tim Clemente was asked in a CNN interview whether the government could review earlier telephone conversations between the late Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his widow, Katherine Russell, to determine if she had any involvement in the crime.

“There is a way,” he said. “We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation.”

“All of that stuff,” he continued after the next question, “is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

That seems to suggest that the government can record or access recordings all of our phone calls. It sounds far-fetched; it sounds downright Orwellian.

But I, for one, would certainly like to know if it’s true. That strikes me as a far bigger crime — and something much more worthy of an aggressive investigation — than a phone call between a government staffer and a reporter.