{"id":7420,"date":"2006-05-16T09:41:16","date_gmt":"2006-05-16T13:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7420"},"modified":"2006-05-16T09:41:16","modified_gmt":"2006-05-16T13:41:16","slug":"journalists-phone-records-are-fair-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/journalists-phone-records-are-fair-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalists’ phone records are ‘fair game’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

“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. […]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The WaPo had a very helpful article on NSLs last November<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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

Josh Marshall explained<\/a>, “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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}