(2013-05-14) Associated Press Reporters Phone Records Seized

*On May 13, 2013, the Associated Press announced telephone records for 20 of their reporters during a two-month period in 2012, had been seized by the Justice Department. They described these acts as a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news-gathering operations... The DOJ did not direct subpoenas to the Associated Press, instead to going to their phone providers, including Verizon Wireless. Verizon neither challenged the subpoena nor did it try to alert the journalists whose records were being requested.

On May 17, 2013, the Washington Post reported the Justice Department monitored James Rosen's activities by tracking his visits to the State Department, through phone traces, timing of calls and his personal emails. To obtain the warrants, they deemed Rosen a "criminal co-conspirator" with Stephen Kim.[17] Rosen was also labeled as a "flight-risk" to keep him from being informed of the ongoing surveillance. The Justice Department's "aggressive investigative methods" have caused various analysts to express concern their "investigative methods of classified leaks by government officials are having a chilling effect on news organizations' (Journalism) ability to play a Watch Dog role.

Members of Congress and media figures have questioned the motivations behind the Justice Department's actions, and if they were even warranted: "For five days, reporters at the Associated Press had been sitting on a big scoop about a foiled AlQaeda plot at the request of CIA officials. Then, in a hastily scheduled Monday morning meeting, the journalists were asked by agency officials to hold off on publishing the story for just one more day. The CIA officials, who had initially cited national security concerns in an attempt to delay publication, no longer had those worries, according to individuals familiar with the exchange. Instead, the Barack Obama administration was planning to announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday AP balked and proceeded to publish that Monday afternoon."*

May16: Joshua Kopstein explains how important the loss of Privacy of "just" Meta Data is. Soghoian notes that in a leaks investigation, most of the actual leaking happens in person — phones are simply used to arrange meetings. So in the end, it’s the non-content records — like those collected in secret from the AP — that really matter. “Which officials are talking to which journalists is what they’re after,” he says, “and it just happens to be that that’s the information that currently gets the lowest protection under US law.”... As for average citizens, who have much weaker protections than journalists doing their jobs, it all comes back to that ancient and notoriously weak privacy law that keeps allowing the US government to capture data en masse without any warrants or legal repercussions: the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986.