US Justice Department acknowledges wide-ranging surveillance of Associated Press

The president of the Associated Press has sent a letter of protest to US Attorney General Eric Holder over the Department of Justice’s broad surveillance of individual reporters’ phone conversations.

In a letter received by the AP on Friday, the Justice Department
acknowledged but offered no explanation for the seizure of two
months’ worth of telephone records of reporters and editors. AP’s
president, Gary Pruitt, called the ongoing monitoring a “massive
and unprecedented intrusion.”

The AP believes that more than 100 journalists are involved in
the DOJ’s phone surveillance, which would have involved a wide
variety of stories regarding government and other topics. Pruitt
has called for the return of obtained phone records, as well as the
destruction of all copies.