How big is media surveillance under Obama

I'm as unhappy as the next guy about government surveillance on journalists and private citizens but I sure wish the media had been this focused when the Bush administration was doing it illegally. Even the NYT is verging on scaremongering about Obama's DoJ. I mean the hed screams US Leaks Inquiries Show How Wide a Net is Cast. About midway through the article it admits, "It is not clear how often the government has obtained reporters’ communications records."

The only person they could get on record for the story is one government guy whose life was ruined under the Bush administration for allegedly leaking about warrantless wiretaps -- on everybody. Meanwhile here's an interesting twist to the Rosen saga.

On Saturday, a Fox News executive said that the notice had gone to News Corp., its parent company, on Aug. 27, 2010, but that Fox News was not told until Friday. The executive said they were still trying to sort out how the notice fell through the cracks.

You might have thought this would be something the parent corp would have brought to their news station's attention right away. Kind of convenient they suddenly discovered it after the AP got all sorts of steam out of their surveillance. And again, in these Obama era cases it's not about wholesale spying on the population or the media. As the government states, "law enforcement officials said the leaks were alarming because someone had shared information while overseas intelligence operations were still under way."

If somebody can show me where any of these stories exposed government misconduct, I'm happy to join in the outrage but so far all I see is a few journos outing active counter-terrorism operations in countries that do pose a danger to our national security, effectively shutting them down because of the exposure. I don't feel so well served by that kind of traffic baiting journalism.

I have to agree with Kevin Drum about this hue and cry over this.

Something about the Rosen case just doesn't add up. But a lot of people don't seem to be taking the possible outing of an intelligence source very seriously. They're acting as if the DOJ prosecution is over a completely meaningless story. That might be, but I think a bit less circling the wagons, and a bit more serious questioning, might be in order here.

I often watch these big journos on the twitter. They hate Obama, not for his politics but because he doesn't treat them with the respect they believe they deserve. Sadly, I don't believe the vast majority of them deserve the respect. They aren't informing the public. When he does hold a presser, they leap to find a single phrase out of hundreds of words and manufacture some kind of fauxtroversy out of it. They skip most of the salient points he makes about policy. Too boring. Doesn't bring in the eyeballs. Maybe if they showed the POTUS the kind of respect he deserves, they would get some in return.

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I come to defend Holder, not condemn him

The AP phone records story is still developing so I don't have much to say yet. Still waiting for more facts to emerge from the noise. So far I've seen nothing to suggest the government acted illegally. As a TPM reader points out:

More important it is clear to anyone who understands what happens in this type of investigation that the Justice Department subpoenaed phone records. Those records came from the phone company not from AP. They relate to dates and times of phone calls not content. Under the law such a subpoena is perfectly proper and under the law Justice and the phone company must notify the party (in this case AP) that records were subpoenaed.

I think AP protests just a bit too much and seeks to smear Justice (knowing full well that many Republicans will jump on this quickly).

Which of course will be great for traffic. This is Drudge bait as tempting as pure crystal coke from Columbia to a junkie.

To be clear, it's vitally important to protect the freedom of the press, especially in its social mandate to investigate government wrongdoing. While it's apparent our present day media had mainly failed in that mission, devoting most of their time to inventing psuedo-scandals in order to drive traffic and make profits for their wealthy owners, we nonetheless need to continue to protect the media from government intimidation and protect whistleblowers from retribution when they assist the media in exposing government malfeasance.

All that being said, let's review why the DoJ started the investigation on the AP and its inside sources. This scoop was not the Pentagon Papers. They weren't exposing something like bombing Cambodia and lying about it, or the cover-up of the Mai-Lai massacre. The AP exposed an undercover, anti-terrorist operation that thwarted a bomb plot which would have killed Americans. In doing so, the AP jeopardized the life of an inside US intelligence asset and effectively forced a CIA operation that could have netted vital intelligence in stopping future terrorism to shut down.

Sorry, if that strikes me as more self-serving than noble. Finding it difficult to couch this one as serving the public. Feels more like serving the bottom line of the AP with a sensational scoop that actually endangered the public. So while it's far too easy for the government to claim national security as a cover for secrecy, in this one particular case I see no evidence Holder can't claim national security concerns drove the investigation. At least not so far.

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