ABC News: The Government Is Snooping On The Media

Not surprisingly, further revelations show the government's spying is not targeted only on terrorists and reveals that (*SHOCK*) when you free the Executive branch from any oversight or even moderate legal restraints, they will abuse their power...

ABC News: Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling

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...

Why how very Nixonesque of them!

Some more detail on what information exactly the government is looking at-

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.

This revelation sheds more light on the report from early January that posed the question of whether CNN's Christiane Amanpour was being surveilled. At the time, it seemed like an odd question that came out of nowhere. Knowing this, we can see that many in the media may been hearing whispers for months that this activity was occurring.

By the way, read the comments at the ABC News link... I wonder if some right-wing blog didn't direct people there, because most of the comments seem to be coming from the crowd that was bitching about 'pulitzer prizes for treason' recently. Comments include "I'm tired of the press helping our enemies", "Excellent the Media needs looking after, Traitors most of them....", "good, you seditionist creeps deserve what you get", and "I hope the information they gain allows them to catch the scum that leak information, and helps them arrest the communist scum who publish it." And that's just four comments in a row I picked at random! These are the people who loath the press as an institution and who have been successfully battering it down to a shell of its former self... They're the far-right who see the press as traitors and would prefer never to have found out that their government was operating secret torture prisons or violating the Constitution and spying on Americans, all so they could sleep safely in their warm Republicans beds. It doesn't disturb them that the government would seek to monitor and intimidate a free and independent press; what bothers them are the (now) rare occassions when said press reveals the potentially criminal actions of our leaders. Methinks some of these so-called conservatives should reflect on what freedoms specifically will be left for us to protect if we make all these concessions. I also have a feeling they would not be celebrating this Orwellian behavior if the President were a donkey and not an elephant.

One also wonders if this will be the straw that actually gets the media up in arms on this story?

Sadly, I doubt it. Few are willing to rock the boat, even if they're already being pushed overboard. So far, only conservative MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough has spoken out. He declared that the President has "contempt for democracy" and noted that "Had this alleged power been used during the Nixon administration, Deep Throat would have been exposed before Watergate erupted." Bingo.

Of course, if you asked the people posting at the ABC news item above, they would probably tell you that Deep Throat was a "traitor" and that Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein were the "seditionist creeps" and "communist scum" that published his revelations.

Matthew Yglesias explores the dark path this slippery slope leads to, given what we know of the other actions of the administration: " It's important to link this up to the broader chain. One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn't like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you'll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself."

Finally, Josh Marshall gets right to the main point of all this-

If that's true, then I think we can set aside any pretense that administration policy on all manner of electronic surveillance isn't being brought to bear on political opponents, media critics, the press, everybody.

I think part of the issue for many people on the administration's various forms of surveillance is not just that some of activities seem to be illegal or unconstitutional on their face. I think many people are probably willing to be open-minded, for better or worse, on pushing the constitutional envelope. But given the people in charge of the executive branch today, you just can't have any confidence that these tools will be restricted to targeting terrorists. Start grabbing up phone records to data-mine for terrorists and then the tools are just too tempting for your leak investigations. Once you do that, why not just keep an eye on your critics too? After all, they're the ones most likely to get the leaks, right? So, same difference. The folks around the president don't recognize any real distinctions among those they consider enemies. So we'd be foolish to think they wouldn't bring these tools to bear on all of them. Once you set aside the law as your guide for action and view the president's will as a source of legitimacy in itself, then everything becomes possible and justifiable.

Just some more stuff to ponder.

Finally, polls continue to show only a slight majority are concerned about all this. [*sigh*]

UPDATE:
ABC News reports partial acknowledgment by the FBI, with the Patriot Act as rationale-

...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...

Hmmmm. A new layer. And more reason to be scared by the Patriot Act!

Josh Marshall has a new entry up, given these new details-

...In a criminal investigation, which a leak investigation can be, investigators can look into all sorts of private information -- phone records, financial records, travel records. They can subpoena you before a grand jury and on and on...

...But in his report Ross doesn't seem to be talking about subpoenas in the course of a conventional criminal investigation. He appears to be referring to something more on-going...

...Given the Bush administration's self-servingly indulgent definition of the War on Terror, I don't doubt that they would define finding leakers as a subdivision of fighting terrorism, or for that matter scrutinizing political opponents...

Further updates from ABC News and other outlets should help shed more light on this.

A detailed interview at Salon features details and insight on the NSA's activities.

[PS- Sen. Specter complains about lack of oversight on all this spying... apparently, he forgets (once again) that he's the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and therefore controls what is and isn't investigated. Senator, you seem like a really nice guy and all, but please stop going on TV to vow you will rein the President in, unless you actually intend to do it. Okay?]

[PPS- U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte appears to have lied. Are you surprised?]