| Monday, May 15, 2006 |
| They are bugging reporters |
I've been saying this for months and now it looks like there's finally some concrete information, strongly indicating that the Bush administration's wide-ranging domestic spy efforts include electronic surveillance of reporters (on top of other niceties, like scouring for the political affiliations of IRS auditees, attempting to rifle through the personal effects of a dead reporter, looking for leak info, and surveilling little old ladies and Quakers who oppose the Iraq war.)
From ABC News' Brian Ross:
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. Ross says he and his colleague were told that the contents of their conversations were not being monitored, but the fact is, the administration wouldn't have to do that. All they need is to do a data match of reporters' known numbers (something easily obtained since reporters use so many administration sources) and the numbers of employees at whatever alphabet agency the administration suspects of disloyalty to the president (as opposed to disloyalty to the constitution, which is increasingly evident in the actions of the Orwellian Team Bush...)
It just doesn't get more Soviet than this.
Tags: News and politics, NSA, spying, Bush, government, Reporters, Orwell, |
posted by JReid @ 5:50 PM   |
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