The Feds are targeting reporters who broke stories about politically damaging and illegal acts by US intelligence.
Following below is a compile of three relevant stories, including independent (albeit second hand) confirmation from Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrorism who is now in the private sector (nudge nudge). Click the titles for the original sources. You should also read (and/or listen to) Amy Goodman’s interview with targeted ABC News journalist Brian Ross. You might also be interested to read about similar experiences by the Capitol Hill Blue blog.
Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You’re Calling
The Blotter, ABC News blog
May 15, 2006 10:33 AM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
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.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA’s secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
ABC Claims Government Traced Its Reporters’ Calls
BY JOSH GERSTEIN
New York Sun
May 16, 2006
ABC News claimed yesterday that phone calls made by its reporters and journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post are being traced by the federal government as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information.
In a blog posting, the network said two of its reporters, Richard Esposito and Brian Ross, were told by an unnamed senior federal official that the government had obtained records of calls placed by the two men. The network said the probe may be focused on leaks about a CIA program to detain terrorism suspects at secret locations outside America, but could also involve the network’s reports on the spy agency’s use of missile-firing Predator drones in Pakistan.
ABC did not assert that its reporters’ conversations were being listened in on, but solely that the government had obtained information on whom reporters were calling.
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.”
Under longstanding Justice Department regulations, prosecutors who subpoena a journalist’s phone records are required to notify the reporter involved within 90 days of obtaining the records. The regulations state that, in most cases, subpoenas should not be issued until after an attempt is made to negotiate access with the reporter.
Spokeswomen for ABC and the Times said their organizations had received no official notification of the effort to seek their phone records. The Washington Post did not respond to a call seeking comment for this article.
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.”
Investigators could obtain records of calls from government phones without any subpoenas, Ms. Dalglish observed.
An FBI spokesman, Bill Carter, called the ABC report “misleading,” but did not dispute that journalists’ phone records have been obtained by his agency. “In any case where the records of a private person are sought, they may only be obtained through established legal process,” he said.
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.
Mr. Carter said the Justice Department guidelines are observed even when seeking national security letters, but he said he was not certain whether the notification provisions were the same in such cases.
The secrecy of the national security letter mechanism could help prosecutors head off court challenges news organizations have brought and sometimes won when prosecutors followed the guidelines.
In 2002, a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, attempted to negotiate with the Times to get copies of its phone records as part of an investigation into a leak that he said resulted in the destruction of evidence by officials at an alleged Islamic charity. The Times refused to cooperate and sued to block disclosure of the records.
A federal judge in Manhattan, Robert Sweet, ruled in favor of the newspaper and blocked any subpoenas. The government’s appeal of that decision is pending before the 2nd Circuit.
FBI Acknowledges: Journalists’ Phone Records are Fair Game
The Blotter, ABC News blog
May 16, 2006 12:25 PM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters’ phone records in leak investigations.
“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.
The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.
The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being “tracked.”
“Think of it more as backtracking,” said a senior federal official.
But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA.
In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.
“The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information,” the statement said.
Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.
Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).
The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.