Snooping on Reporters
15 May 2006 2:02 pm by Taylor Marsh
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We've been playing with some new technical features, so this has been an extremely busy day for me and my tech team. I'll have some fun news to share in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned. Anyway, let's get down to it.
You just knew this was happening, but couldn't be sure. Earlier today, we learned
that the feds are snooping into reporters' lives to find out their confidential
sources. This is frightening on so many fronts. First, it impedes the First
Amendment, not to mention the most important instrument of this democracy, the
free press. It's bad enough Bush has made them lapdogs, to use Eric Boehlert's
book title. But now it's not even enough to have the press as simple lapdogs.
All anonymous sources must be rooted out and stopped. The wingnuts will be thrilled.
After all, can't have an uppity press looking into what government is doing,
now can we?
One subject that alarmed the CIA was ABC's story on the Pakistan stinger missiles.
It's likely that people didn't like Brian Ross' report on “the spider cell”
either. However, this latest development is truly creepy, Dick Nixon creepy,
that is.
Oh, but our government wants everyone to know that they're not listening to
the “content” of the reporters' conversations, just the “pattern
of phone calls” made. Somehow that doesn't make me feel one whit better.
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is
tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an
effort to root out confidential sources.“It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source
told us in an in-person conversation.ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling,
or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the
recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for
ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being
examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
