Obama Administration's Media Surveillance Unleashes Wave Of Condemnation

[AdamSmith]

Getting the whole 4th Estate this riled up at you would seem to be a strategy not pursued with such success since Nixon...

Obama Administration's Media Surveillance Unleashes Wave Of Condemnation

The Huffington Post | By Rebecca Shapiro and Jack Mirkinson Posted: 05/22/2013 9:05 am EDT | Updated: 05/23/2013 10:20 am EDT

The Justice Department's investigation and surveillance of the Associated Press and Fox News have led to perhaps the most sustained wave of criticism for the Obama administration's media policies since the president took office.

On Wednesday, the New York Times became one of the more influential voices to say what many others have been saying: that the administration's methods are an attack on press freedom.

In a scathing editorial, the Times wrote that, "With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible 'co-conspirator' in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news."

The Times editorial described the Obama administration as going "overboard" with its investigations into leaks and threatening press freedom. The board added:

Obama administration officials often talk about the balance between protecting secrets and protecting the constitutional rights of a free press. Accusing a reporter of being a 'co-conspirator,' on top of other zealous and secretive investigations, shows a heavy tilt toward secrecy and insufficient concern about a free press.

The Times editorial was just one in a chorus of hard-hitting attacks on Obama's media policy that have surfaced in the wake of the Justice Department investigations. Journalists were outraged by the inquiries into the AP and Fox News reporter James Rosen. In particular, members of the media took issue with the Justice Department labeling Rosen a possible "co-conspirator" in a leak case for the crime of trying to get a source to give up information.

The New Yorker reported on Tuesday that the investigation into Rosen was even broader than previously suspected, as the DOJ seized records from at least five different numbers used by Fox News and two different White House lines.

That followed the Associated Press' revelation that the DOJ had secretly obtained months of phone records for at least seven individual journalists across 20 phone lines while searching for the government official responsible for leaking information about a CIA-thwarted terror plot.

Obama's hyper-aggressive leak policy—and his administration's potential equation of routine journalistic interaction with criminality—is nothing new. But the fury in the pages and on the websites of elite outlets about these positions certainly is.

The Times' criticism echoed that of many other journalists and press freedom groups.

On Tuesday, the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists sent an outraged letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, in which it warned that the DOJ's secret subpoenas for over 20 AP phone lines "represent a damaging setback for press freedom in the United States." This came on the heels of a letter signed by over 50 media outlets which made similar arguments.

Wednesday also saw Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank lash out at Obama:

The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/nytimes-obama-white-house-doj-investigations_n_3318748.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular

[Guest hitoallusa]

Not sure why no one is focused on who actually perpetuated this and what was their motivations.. I think it will simply go away and buried. It won't bring Obama down or anything.

[TampaYankee]

I of mixed minds on the Rosen affair but on the whole, I lean toward the Administration. This probably puts me on the other side of the fence from most here. My reasoning is pretty simple.

Before proceeding I'll state that I was on the side of the release of the Pentagon Papers. Daniel Schor and the NYT were right to publish and Daniel Ellsburg was legally culpable for leaking. He was probably right also for leaking but in a moral, not legal way. He paid the price for a deliberate act to break the law which he knew he was doing. I do not believe you can sanction the leaking of sensitive information by anyone who believes it is morally right. We have lost lives over leaked information. It has repercussions. Now on to Rosen...

I would lean more toward Rosen if he was a third party reporter that a so-called whistle blower came to with classified information. It is still on the reporter and his news organization to vet the information and seek input from the government prior to any publication. As mentioned, lives have been lost over leaked information, not to mention compromising important operations.

However, it is my understanding that Rosen actually suborned a government contract employee with high security clearance to violate the Espionage act by soliciting and then conspiring with that person to obtain and communicate that information. That is the basis of my view in a nut shell. It is one thing to receive unsolicited classified information from a 'whistle blower', quite another to solicit and conspire to surreptitiously pass that information on.

In my view it is no different than someone soliciting another to commit bank robbery and conspiring to help facilitate the act. It is a solicitation to break the law and commit a crime. In this case an espionage crime. Let me repeat, the guilt is in the solicitiation and conspiracy, not in receiving the information through a non-tainted contact.

It does not matter that Rosen had no malicious intent to harm the United States. The information obtained and released might very well harm the United States, its interests or its personnel. Rosen solicited, and conspired in, the violation of the Espionage Act. Rosen stepped over the line.

Reporters are not imbued with the power to solicit and commit crimes in the pursuit of the profession no matter the intent. He has contributed, at the least, to wrecking one person's life permanently. Maybe more?

[RA1]

Interesting observation. I think there are similarities to the police entrapping a potential suspect with "tainted" evidence. At least it becomes tainted because of the way the police used it. However, the police and other "authorities" are generally held to a higher standard for their conduct, as they should be, in my opinion.

Do you think that reporters also should be held to a higher standard? If so, on what basis?

Obviously the "manufacture" of facts would be one instance but if the "facts" are correct, is how they are obtained critical or just a moral issue? The Supremes might have to answer this question.

Best regards,

RA1

[lookin]

As a general rule, I'd prefer my government to have fewer secrets, and to let me have more. It just feels a little cheerier somehow.

The New Yorker ran an interesting article some years back, soon after 9/11, in which they contrasted Germany's views on government intelligence with our own, and noted that the Germans believed their government should be transparent to the citizenry, and the citizenry should be opaque to the government. They were reacting to the excesses of the Third Reich, of course, but it seemed like a pretty good formula to me.

I worry about a government with a lot of secrets. First of all, there's the apparatus that needs to be put in place to make sure the secrets don't get out, and then there's the vulnerability that arises when they eventually do. And then the apparatus gets further hardened and a cycle continues that generally does not bode well for the masses.

Another problem with secrets is who gets to decide that something's a secret and how they make that decision. Since it's a secret, we don't get to know the who, or the why, or the what. We just have to rely on faith that it's all good. And that's another trajectory that doesn't always make for happy landings.

It's not clear, to me anyway, that someone in government who decides that something should be a secret is necessarily morally superior to someone outside of government who decides that it shouldn't. If we all start believing that government is the last word in moral superiority, then aren't we on our way to a dictatorship?

And, finally, why should we take it as fact that exposing a government secret will necessarily cost human lives? Isn't it equally possible that exposing a government secret might save human lives? Bradley Manning's Wikileaks caused a lot of embarrassment, no doubt, but, in spite of the hue and cry, I haven't yet seen an analysis that his exposed secrets cost any more lives than they saved. In fact, I wonder what the body count would have been if the secret 'intelligence' that got us into the Iraq war had been exposed before Secretary of State Powell fired up the UN, rather than after.

I guess, at this point, I have a lot more questions than answers. The only thing I'm fairly sure of is that the government has more resources for keeping secrets from me than I have for keeping secrets from it, even with guys like James Rosen 'conspiring' to level the playing field.

Extra Credit Question: Why is it a 'conspiracy' when a citizen unlocks a government secret, but not when a government functionary locks it up in the first place?

[RA1]

Unfortunately the theory of conspiracies abounds.

Best regards,

RA1