The recent seizure of Associated Press reporter’s phone records by the Justice Department has raised a modicum of virility in an agency that covered civil liberty breaches by the last two administrations with a distant gaze. Gary Pruitt, AP president and CEO, stated in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, “I am writing to object in the strongest possible terms to a massive and unprecedented intrusion by the Department of Justice into the newsgathering activities of The Associated Press.” Indeed that spirit of objection would have been welcomed by the millions of Americans caught up in dragnet digital surveillance by a national security state run amok for more than a decade.
Last week, Guardian columnist and former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald spoke to this:
…it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as "cruel and inhuman".
But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up…
Of course this ever-increasing onslaught of surveillance activities began with the Bush administration force feeding the American public the Patriot Act, the NSA electronic surveillance program and the amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allowed for warrantless surveillance on American citizen communications if one of the parties is outside of the U.S.
Major communication companies were not only willing to hand over detailed records of their customers, but in the case of AT&T they built “secret rooms” in various operation locations that housed surveillance equipment for the U.S. government. These setups enabled the government to transfer every individual message on the internet to their systems for evaluating.
Many analysts believed this activity to be an extension of the Total Information Awareness program headed by disgraced former National Security Advisor under Reagan, John Poindexter. (Poindexter was convicted of five counts of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra Affair. The conviction was overturned on appeal.) According to a 2002 NY Times article:
As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.
William Binney, former NSA crypto-mathematician and now whistleblower left the organization in 2001 after he discovered that a component of the software he had developed to streamline data mining was being used without features that protected U.S. citizen's Fourth Amendment rights. Below is a video of Binney describing his whistleblower journey and how every U.S. citizen’s digital communication is being swept and stored by U.S. intelligence and surveillance entities. He never mentions the AP’s exclusion in this plan.
For anyone paying attention to the ongoing erosion of civil liberties in this country by the last two administrations, the AP phone records seizures should come as no surprise. Everyone’s a target and reasoning is flimsy or secret. It’s as unacceptable for the voiceless, unknowing millions going about their daily lives as it is for the press attempting to do its job. The question becomes, has the AP been paying attention?
May 24, 2013