Obama’s War on Whistle Blowers Could Send Investigative Journalism Back to the Stone Age
In November of last year the Federal Trade Commission settled its suit against Facebook for violating users' privacy. Among other things, the settlement requires Facebook to undergo “privacy audits” for the next two decades. There’s something deeply absurd about an agency under President Obama hammering anyone for violating users’ privacy, much less Facebook: This administration has snooped egregiously and unlawfully since its earliest days; you’d think the FTC would be too embarrassed to go after a site whose users give away information voluntarily.
Take, for instance, the Obama administration's new tactics for catching and prosecuting whistle blowers. Gone are the days when reporters will be able to protect a source’s identity by refusing to comply with a subpoena. Hell, gone are the days when reporters will even be subpoened. By reading email, listening to phone conversations, and intercepting texts, security agencies already know who journalists are talking to, and what they’re talking about. The New York Times published a piece yesterday on the DOJ's increasing ability to prosecute with as little due process as possible. The standard is evolving in front of our eyes:
MR. ASHCROFT authorized a single subpoena for reporters' testimony or records in his four years in office, Mr. Corallo said. He would not say so, but that subpoena was probably the one that troubled Judge Sack in 2006. The reporters lost. In a dissent, Judge Sack said he feared for the future.
"Reporters might find themselves," he wrote, "as a matter of practical necessity, contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs - by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways. Ordinary use of the telephone could become a threat to journalist and source alike. It is difficult to see in whose best interests such a regime would operate."
What he imagined may now be reality. Consider the most recent prosecution, of John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. agent who is said to have disclosed classified information to journalists in 2008 about the capture and interrogation of an operative of Al Qaeda.
The criminal complaint in the case says it is based largely on "e-mails recovered from search warrants served on two e-mail accounts associated with Kiriakou."
Only one of the journalists involved in the Kiriakou case has been publicly identified: Scott Shane of The Times. A spokeswoman for The Times has said that neither the paper nor Mr. Shane had been contacted by investigators or had provided any information to them. The digital trail, it seems, was enough.
In a second case, against Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer accused of providing classified information to another Times reporter, James Risen, for a 2006 book, the government has been more aggressive, insisting that Mr. Risen must testify. He has refused to say anything about confidential matters, and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., has sided with him. She said there were other ways to prove the case against Mr. Sterling, including "numerous telephone records, e-mail messages, computer files and testimony that strongly indicates that Sterling was Risen's source."
The government has appealed that ruling. "The circumstantial evidence of guilt, though compelling, is simply not comparable to Risen's eyewitness testimony," prosecutors told the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., in a brief filed last month.
The appeal in Mr. Risen's case may, at first blush, suggest that the new primacy of digital surveillance in leak investigations is overstated. But Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the case was a vestige of another era.
She described a conference in June organized by the Aspen Institute that brought together lawyers, journalists and intelligence officials to talk about government secrecy. The ground rules, she said, were that the identities of those involved were to be kept confidential, but what was said could be reported.
"I was told in a rather cocky manner" by a national security representative, Ms. Dalglish recalled, that "the Risen subpoena is one of the last you'll see."
She continued, paraphrasing the official: "We don't need to ask who you're talking to. We know."
While rent seeking tech companies continue to partner with the Obama Administration (including one whose motto is "Do No Evil"), journalists and government employees will soon be reduced to "meeting in darkened doorways."
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
-
It is okay if Obama turns us into a tool from the government. We want to be his tool. He sends a thrill up our leg. Obama's dreamy. You leave him alone!!
-
"For more than 99 per cent of human history people have lived in groupings that social scientists call "non-state societies."...Historically, people in non-state societies are relatively AUTONOMOUS and SOVERIEGN. They generate their own subsistence with little or no assistance from outside sources. They bow to no external political leaders."
Elman R. Service (1975), Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: Norton.
NON-STATE AND STATE SOCIETIES
http://faculty.smu.edu/rkemper.....ieties.pdf -
-
(Hiding a secret State Cop Agenda), WI always cites phony "Anti-State" screeds written by TENured State-Employed Lackeys. Funny, Funny.
-
"The Kiriakou indictment for leaking" the identities of C.I.A. officers involved in a program that many people called torture, he said, "is particularly disgusting in the context of zero indictments for actually torturing, or for directing torture, or for writing spurious legal justifications for it."
Oh, remember the days when blowing a CIA agent's cover was the worst thing you could do? Back when people thought Karl Rove did it?
-
Kiriakou is under indictment. So apparently it still is. Although he seemed to have leaked the name of real agents rather than suburban Virginia soccer moms.
-
Well, that is the incident (whose pursuit was egged on by the New York Times and Glenn Greenwald, for that matter) that set the precedent that overturned years of practice.
It indeed used to be the case that leaks were accepted as part of what happened. Not anymore.
-
Threadjack, albeit marginally related: I've been thinking on and off about paranoid computing. How do you use the internet in such a way as to maintain as much deniability about your activities?
The best answer I've come up with is a clean netbook. Boot linux off a USB stick. Run truecrypt on the stick, and keep all your files and apps on the stick. This allows you to maintain comtrol over the box to avoid bott level issues, but you keep nothing on the box. Everything lives on the stick, and with sufficient encryption, they'll never crack that.
-
Unless you die before giving them the key.
Which you will...
-
I don't recognize "journalists" as a class of people deserving some special rights the rest of us don't enjoy. The problem is increased systematic surveillance of everyone, not just when applied to people who happen to work for newspapers and people who happen to work for the government.
-
I agree with this, actually. Freedom of the press is the right to use technology to facilitate speech, not the right of a self-anointed group of private citizens to break the law because they are allegedly serving the public good.
If there is a valid protection for leaks (and there ought to be, within reason), it will be found somewhere else. Perhaps a judicial assertion that the state lacks the authority to shield unlawful activity from scrutiny.
-
the state lacks the authority to shield [its own] unlawful activity from scrutiny
This ought to be obvious. I mean really fucking obvious.
It would take a politician, lawyer, or ethicist to miss it, wouldn't it?
-
sounds like murdoch tatics ala the sun
-
Back to the stone age? I'm investing in hammers and chisels.
-
Privacy is antiquatedWait till we have 30k drones in the sky
-
""She continued, paraphrasing the official: "We don't need to ask who you're talking to. We know."""
Yeah. National Security letter to her ISP and phone company to get her call records.
Government can get pretty much any damn record it's wants, when it desires as long as there's a national security angle.
-
"as long as there's a national security angle"? No, it only requires that they say there is
-
This would be why both the reporter and the leaker should be thinking hard about good operational security.
Don't use real names. Don't use any electronic communications, and if you do make it a burn phone. Meet in person only to establish trust. Set up back channels. Dead drops. Consider using the US post, but send it from a blue box. Stegonagraphy? One time pads (but are you sure you can mange it safely)?
-
You have to pick one out from other than the country of origin but voice analysis makes them useless. Face, and speech recognition are a very real and unheeded Silent Spring
-
Sounds like a rock solid plan to me dude. WOw.
-
likes