Yesterday, the AP disclosed that the DOJ obtained lists of “incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery.” Apparently this is in the service of an investigation of a leak — one that revealed an Al-Queda affiliate plot to blow up an airliner on the anniversary of the killing of Bin Laden. Except that it wasn’t a real plot –it was one cooked up by a CIA plant to try to discover the elements of this affiliate. The Obama Administration has been pursuing this leak — they seem to pursue them all — but there is a little extra impetus in this one:
In the months since those revelations, the Justice Department pushed hard to uncover the source of the leak, driven in part by demands from Republican lawmakers it had endangered national security. The DOJ’s campaign was heavily criticized by members of the media, who warned that it would have a chilling effect on the source-reporter relationship, and by civil liberties groups, who viewed it as an infringement on First Amendment rights.
The DOJ isn’t talking about why it got that subpeona for these records and that is important to know. Which means that I have no idea if the DOJ is using provisions of the overly broad Patriot Act to get to the APs info. But I do know that pretty much all of the politicians and pundits who are rending their garments over this today have been supporters of not just the Patriot Act, but much of the expansion of the surveillance state that makes checking in on what US citizens are doing incredibly easy. And that includes the Editorial Boards of many of the news organizations who are howling today.
So I guess all of this surveillance was AOK as long as you couldn’t imagine that you’d ever be a target of it. The government should not have all of the advantages of surveilling its citizens. I don’t care what the danger is. But today journalists found out that they are subject to the same surveillance that the rest of us are subject to. They weren’t quite so upset about this when all of this was put in place, but perhaps now that they are clear targets of the surveillance state, perhaps some changes will finally be made.
Of course, there is more info to be had on this, so I may change my mind. But for now, while I’m mad at the DOJ for this, I’m way more angry that I’m as mad at the Patriot Act police state as when it was implemented and everyone expected me to believe the BS of “if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you won’t care about what the government knows about you”. And I’m mad that the now targeted media repeated this BS rather then report on what all of this surveillance meant to the rest of us who were targets of it.