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The word Nixonian is going to get quite a workout this month.

First, there was news that the Internal Revenue Service had been targeting conservative non-profits with the words patriot or tea party in their names. Now comes word that the U.S. Justice Department secretly obtained two months of phone records for reporters and editors at The Associated Press.

The records, which showed incoming and outgoing calls and the length each call, were for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters as well as general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, the APs attorneys said.

The records covered 20 separate phone lines used over two months.

There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said in a letter of protest to the Justice Department.

You got that right.

These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to APs newsgathering operations, and disclose information about APs activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know, Pruitt said.

Worse is that the government will not say why it seized the records, though officials have previously said they were conducting a criminal investigation into who leaked information about a foiled terror plot in Yemen that the AP reported on in May of 2012. The story disclosed details of a CIA operation that stopped an al-Qaida plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane headed for the U.S.

While prosecutors have sought phone records from reporters before, but the clandestine seizure of such a broad array phone records which included AP offices, general switchboard numbers and an office-wide fax line is unprecedented.

It would be one thing for the Justice Department to spy on government employees to try to determine where leaks are, but it is quite another thing to secretly pull months of phone records of a news organization, records that could reflect lots of calls with lots of sources on many different topics, just to try to plug a leak.

See the article here:
Day’s Worst: Spying on the press