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Out Of Control Government Grabs AP’s Phone Records–Freedom Of The Press Is Dead
by Monica Davus
A major newswire service announced a massive government breech of freedom of the press rights. The Associated Press announced that the Justice Department secretly went after the phone records of reporters and editors.
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls. MORE
According to CNN, the American Civil Liberties Union demands that the Justice Department eplain its actons. Government fishing expeditions compromise the pillar of the nation’s oldest tenets: Freedom of the Press
“Obtaining a broad range of telephone records in order to ferret out a government leaker is an unacceptable abuse of power,” Ben Wizner, the head of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a written statement. “Freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy, and that freedom often depends on confidential communications between reporters and their sources.” MORE
they want the sources so they can silence them and cover up their tracks.