Journalists’ phone records are ‘fair game’

May 16, 2006

Following up on their earlier report on the government [tag]monitor[/tag]ing their [tag]calls[/tag], [tag]ABC[/tag] News’ Brian Ross and Richard Esposito added last night that the FBI has acknowledged that it is “increasingly seeking reporters’ phone records in leak investigations.”

“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the [tag]Bush[/tag] [tag]administration[/tag],” said a senior federal official. […]

The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News [tag]phone calls[/tag] were being “tracked.” “Think of it more as backtracking,” said a senior federal official.

But [tag]FBI[/tag] officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA.

In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records. “The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information,” the statement said.

Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.

The apparent mechanism used by the FBI here is [tag]National Security Letters[/tag] ([tag]NSL[/tag]), originally created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, but expanded under Bush through the Patriot Act to apply to almost anyone.

The WaPo had a very helpful article on NSLs last November, which explained that the law now empowers the FBI to obtain secret information about Americans — including phone calls, internet visits, even credit ratings — whether they’re suspected of wrongdoing or not. Officials can probe personal information in total secrecy, literally forever. This information can be collected without the consent, or even knowledge, of a judge. And these letters are issued routinely, tens of thousands of times a year in the post-9/11 era.

And now the law, apparently, is being used to target [tag]journalists[/tag], because they occasionally report on leaks from government officials.

Josh Marshall explained, “Given the Bush administration’s self-servingly indulgent definition of the War on Terror, I don’t doubt that they would define finding leakers as a subdivision of fighting terrorism, or for that matter scrutinizing political opponents. We need to know more about what Ross is talking about.” Sounds like a good idea.

I guess this was the reason Bush attached a signing statement to the Patriot Act saying he doesn’t have to tell Congress what the FBI is up to.

  • Wonder if they could track phone calls from the Office of the VP right around the time of the Plame leak.

    Wait – whoops – can’t do that. Executive privilege.

    ITMFA. ITMFA. ITMFA.

  • All too reminiscent of a fascist state that attempts to control all sources of information.

  • Like every other program the Bush administration has proposed – other than cutting taxes for the obscenely rich – this one is a failure from the start.

    Its only accomplishment is that it distracts us from the crimes of the Bush Crime Family and the military mis-adventure that is Iraq-Iran.

  • “Wonder if they could track phone calls from the Office of the VP right around the time of the Plame leak.” – BC

    I wonder if they could get the phone calls of the Oil Company executives who wrote the Bushite energy plan. I find it fascinating that these people have an absolute right to privacy in their communications with Dick Cheney, but you and I don’t have a right to privacy with our doctors, lawyers, employers, employees, etc..

  • Bob Woodward has been conspicuously silent about all this.

    Hey Bob, are you busy counting your millions you earned for shilling for White House press releases that were published as books?

    Too bad you sold out to today’s modern version of Nixon.

  • Nothing Bush does will stop people within the government from leaking stuff to the press.

    This just means that media contacts within the government will stop using their phones (if, in fact, they used them to begin with). It’s back to “Deep Throat,” meeting in shadowy corners of underground parking garages.

  • I’m not sure how to spell it, but this seems to be a reverse form of “Schedenfraude” for the CCCP (Compliant Complicit Corporate Press), that has spent the last ten years doing everything in its power to prove that it is NOT liberal — bird-dogging the Big Dog (Clinton) and cheerleading for the Royal Buffoon (Bush). If it didn’t portend so much disaster for our own civil liberties, I’d be inclined to say that it serves the bastards right.

    And ABC is sooooo concerned about these new revelations that there was nary a word about it on the ABC Evening News last night. How big is ABC’s outrage about their own maltreatment? As big as it is for the rest of us being abused. Bastards.

    Seems that all of the CCCP and most of America is sufferring from the “boiled frog syndrome.” Each week more and more is revealed about the duplicity and corruptness of BushCo and their shredding of the Constitution. Just as a frog in warm water fails to realize the heat is being turned up until it is too late to escape and is thus boiled to death, so too are our rights slowly, inexorably, irrevocably, being stripped away…. Seems history IS being repeated, and BushCo is even having Halliburton build the detention camps as we speak, of course “for emergency use only.”

    I hope that we wake up from this national nightmare in time to rescue ourselves from the fascist storm that is gaining strength, gaining broader scope, and gaining momentum.

  • It seems to me that the majority, if not all, of the leaks had to deal with programs that are either illegal, violated Constitutional rights, or revealed a program that was embarrassing to the Bush White House. Has any leak ever actually exposed a top secret LEGAL program that would actually damage our ability to combat terrorism and protect national security?

    That is, leaks that weren’t OK’d by Cheney

  • #9

    The administration believes that the disclosure of the secret prisons in parts of Europe such as Poland harmed national security. While that’s debatable, I’m comfortable with the majority of the leaks exposing at the very least legally questionable domestic surveillance tactics.

  • True, Fascism,
    Just like the domestic surveillance program, I’ve heard from the administration and its supporters that revealing the existence of the prisons has damaged “national security”. But I have yet to find out how. I came across a WaPo article where the White House said that the nations with the prisons are now suseptible to terrorist attacks as retaliation. But who doesn’t run the risk of terrorist attack nowadays?
    Like I posted, it seems that BushCo is more concerned about trying to stop politically damaging and embarrassing leaks than they are about safeguarding national security.

  • Have we been so jaded and apathetic about news reports on domestic surveillance programs? Is it because we no longer trust the news media? Is it because we have been deluded by MMORGs, TV, and a sense that nothing we do is no longer important to the affairs of the republic? Have we quietly capitulated to the fact that our country is going to slip down to third-rate banana republic in the next 20 years controlled by a near-theocratic grip on power?

    It’s really kind of sad that there’s no outrage over the domestic surveillance programs as a tool of the war on terror. It’s a slippery slope… first they came for the Arab terrorists, then they came for the news reporters, then, they came after …… I’m sure you can guess that it’s going to be domestic political opponents… Will that be enough to provoke outrage?

  • What Bushies really want the datasbase for is voter registeration.
    So they better target voters ( Black) to disenfranchise.
    I beleive this with my heart and soul.

  • I’m becoming convinced that Bush’s war on terror is a personal battle. He’s at war with everyone and everything that terrifies him. That now includes the not completely compliant press and all of us citizens that are telling pollsters he sucks. Face it … we’re the enemy now.

  • More from the New York Sun on this story:

    ABC News claimed yesterday that phone calls made by its reporters and journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post are being traced by the federal government as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information.
    In a blog posting, the network said two of its reporters, Richard Esposito and Brian Ross, were told by an unnamed senior federal official that the government had obtained records of calls placed by the two men. The network said the probe may be focused on leaks about a CIA program to detain terrorism suspects at secret locations outside America, but could also involve the network’s reports on the spy agency’s use of missile-firing Predator drones in Pakistan.

    ABC did not assert that its reporters’ conversations were being listened in on, but solely that the government had obtained information on whom reporters were calling.

    A former counterterrorism chief at the CIA, Vincent Cannistraro, told The New York Sun yesterday that FBI sources have confirmed to him that reporters’ calls are being tracked as part of the probe. “The FBI is monitoring calls of a number of news organizations as part of this leak investigation,” Mr. Cannistraro, who has worked as a consultant for ABC, said “It is going on. It is widespread and it may entail more than those three media outlets.”

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