Thursday, July 18, 2013

Free press? The problem with the DOJ’s ‘new’ rules

Some of us can remember when it was the Justice Department’s policy not to prosecute members of the news media based even partly on newsgathering activities, which were assumed to be protected by the First Amendment. This wasn’t codified in law or in regulation; it was just deemed a matter of common sense. So the Justice Department’s new guidelines about when and how it may frisk the news media matters a lot less than what Justice’s actual intentions are.
The occasion for the new guidelines is a recent flurry of leak investigations. In one, concerning an Associated Press story about a failed al-Qaeda plot, Justice helped itself to two months’ worth of secretly subpoenaed phone records on 20 separate phone lines for people who worked at the AP. In another, concerning a Fox News story about an imminent nuclear test in North Korea, Justice obtained emails from reporter James Rosen. Although Rosen hasn’t been prosecuted, his alleged source, a former intelligence analyst named Stephen Kim, has been indicted, and Rosen himself is named in an FBI affidavit as an “aider, abettor, and/or co-conspirator.” In a third instance, the Justice department is reportedly investigating Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for leaking information about how Israel and the U.S. jointly loosed the Stuxnet computer virus on Iran’s nuclear facilities. (No subpoenas are known to have been obtained against The New York Times.)

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/15/leak-investigations-dojs-old-rules-were-fine-if-it-would-obey-them/ 

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