Seizure of Journalists' Telephone Records Confirmed
by TChris
Another source has confirmed yesterday's news that the FBI is snooping into the telephone records of journalists at ABC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post to determine who in the government may have leaked classified information to news outlets.
A former counterterrorism chief at the CIA, Vincent Cannistraro, told The New York Sun yesterday that FBI sources have confirmed to him that reporters' calls are being tracked as part of the probe. "The FBI is monitoring calls of a number of news organizations as part of this leak investigation," Mr. Cannistraro, who has worked as a consultant for ABC, said "It is going on. It is widespread and it may entail more than those three media outlets."
CBS reports that "this leak investigation" probably refers to the FBI investigation "of leaks of information about secret CIA prisons."
The executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, Lucy Dalglish, said the government's reported acquisition of journalists' calling records was part of a pattern of intrusions on First Amendment rights by the Bush administration. "I'm ready to throw my arms up in the air," she said. "If there was a subpoena, they are supposed to be notified."
When a subpoena is used to obtain a journalist's telephone records, a Justice Department policy requires disclosure of that seizure to the journalist within 90 days. It isn't clear whether the Justice Department relied on subpoenas or whether it followed that policy.
One ambiguity the Justice Department may be exploiting is that the regulations, adopted in 1980, refer to trial and grand jury subpoenas. ABC suggested yesterday that its records may have been obtained without going through the courts, but instead by using authority for so-called national security letters contained in an anti-terrorism law passed in 2001, the Patriot Act.
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