Obama's Justice Department is under fire following revelations revealed by the Associated Press that the government secretly obtained two months worth of private phone records from the news agency in 2012 during what appears to be a brazen attempt to discover the source of an intelligence leak.
Calling the seizure of records a "massive and unprecedented intrusion," AP itself disclosed the events on Monday after being informed by a US attorneys office on Friday:
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed 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, according to attorneys for the AP.
In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
In a sharply worded letter, AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt protested the government's action, saying it was a direct assault on the freedom of the press.
(...)
But press freedom advocates were quick to align this latest incident with a pattern of behavior by the Obama administration in which aggressive campaigns against whistleblowers and a severe lack of transparency have made a presidency that promised openness instead one of the most secretive. Full story...
Related posts:
Calling the seizure of records a "massive and unprecedented intrusion," AP itself disclosed the events on Monday after being informed by a US attorneys office on Friday:
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed 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, according to attorneys for the AP.
In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
In a sharply worded letter, AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt protested the government's action, saying it was a direct assault on the freedom of the press.
(...)
But press freedom advocates were quick to align this latest incident with a pattern of behavior by the Obama administration in which aggressive campaigns against whistleblowers and a severe lack of transparency have made a presidency that promised openness instead one of the most secretive. Full story...
Related posts:
- Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
- TrapWire company conducting even more surveillance...
- The war against Bradley Manning: a war against all who speak out against injustice...
- The global war on free speech...
- How smear tactics in the US punish investigative journalists...
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