I supported Obama and worked for the campaign in 2008. I'm sad to see that this administration has been more aggressive in leak persecution than GWB.
I don't think there is anything wrong in pursuing illegal leaks of classified information. I DO think it's wrong to target bona fide journalists for criminal prosecution based on their reporting. The optics of this kind of thing are bad no matter how you look at it.
As a reporter, you're allowed to ask a question. You have no right to information a source is legally required to withhold. That said, if they violate that requirement, it's not your fault. Obtaining the private emails of journalists is crossing a line. It makes it impossible for a journalist to guarantee the safety of their sources.
I think Holder is on pretty thin ice here and generations of future journalists are going to look at what happened and adjust their methods. As citizens, we have a right to know what our government does even if it doesn't want us to.
If a person with information decides to risk their freedom so that citizens can be informed, that's their choice. Attacking the fifth estate will make revolutionaries of us all.
Yeah, I thought this was settled with the Pentagon Papers. But apparently everyone changed their mind after Wikileaks, and without court oversight.
Can Fox News sue here? It seems like calling him a co-conspirator (aka journalist) just to get the search warrant with no plans to charge him is super fishy.
And even more puzzling than Holder's actions, why isn't Fox News trumpeting this instead of Benghazi?
Nothing they do makes any sense. The ruling elite live in a different world from us commoners. Holder probably thought people would view him as a hero or something.
Bad wording on my part. I guess I was saying that there hasn't been a major court decision overturning US vs Ellsbury/NYT, yet somehow everyone's just pretending it's gone. Seems to me like in order to contradict that previous ruling you should be going to the Supreme Court.
I also think it's sketchy as hell to name someone as a 'co-conspirator' in a leak case for being a journalist who was leaked to. That's not conspiracy, it's doing their job with protection from the first amendment.
They aren't pretending it's gone. There is a difference between a journalist passively receiving classified material which a source decides to provide them and a journalist actively soliciting a source to provide classified material. The government has a reasonable argument that a journalist actively soliciting for classified material may be in violation of the law and not protected under the first amendment. This has not been settled by case law and the judge which signed off on the search warrant agreed with the government that the journalist may be a co-conspirator.
Thanks, I hadn't thought about it that way. Still disagree with it and all that but at least it makes some amount of sense that they were able to pull it off now.
There was an article on BI a few days ago saying how "Americans don't care" about the AP spying (from a survey), and that they cared a lot more about IRS and Benghazi.
But let's put things in context. The IRS scandal, and especially the Benghazi one, have been trumpeted at least 10x more than the AP one. Maybe 100x more. With such "awareness campaign" is it really a surprise most people responded in the surveys with IRS or Benghazi?
So what this really means is that the media themselves don't really care about the AP spying - which is actually quite frightening, and a worse situation than I thought. You'd think they would want to turn this into another Watergate or something - but apparently not. Same for the Fox News journalist.
These two stories would be reason enough to call for the impeachment of the president in my book. I mean it threatens a core power in the society - the press. The Benghazi story, and even the IRS one to "some" degree, are the real distractions here.
Yeah, I hate that circular logic. Americans drink more coke than pepsi, look at the advertising budgets. You hammer something on prime time every night for 6 months and people will think it's a bigger deal than the story you don't.
There's not an actual scandal behind Benghazi. Literally none. They're alleging a cover-up, "of what?", "they're covering it up!". That's the whole story and somehow it's 6 months of airtime.
The IRS story is just bad CYA by the administrators there. Political groups applying for charity status is in fact something that the IRS should be auditing and cracking down on, regardless of political party, and there were a lot of tea party groups applying for charity status -- The dept head was actually a Bush appointee, they just weren't tactful enough about how they set their filters to make it look more bipartisan.
This leak case, on the other hand, is actual erosion of press freedoms. And the media (?!?!?!!) seem to care the least about it.
Without asserting criminality, the Benghazi affair was entirely deserving of serious inquiry and investigation but regrettably we such have such immature and partisan Government that the opposition party chose to make it a completely farcical political spectacle.
So much that, it is easier for reasonable people to assume there's nothing to any of it other than political attacks when in fact there clearly was some kind of bureaucratic ineptitude and they were officially blaming a YouTube video for weeks.
Brandon Webb and the guys over at SOFREP have been doing a fair bit of reporting on the subject. tl;dr: Benghazi was a colossal screwup and exposed how JSOC operations in the area put State Department people at risk.
Obviously, if people died, then someone screwed up bad.
But the "scandal" hasn't been about who screwed up. It's been about whether Obama used the word terrorism enough times in the aftermath, and nebulous accusations of "cover-up" with no actual allegations of wrongdoing that's being covered up. It's pathetic.
That part of the scandal is about Team Obama blaming this on the Emmanuel Goldstein du jore, who's still in jail. Otherwise you have to accept the Administration's narrative that Arab mobs routinely bring RPGs and mortars to their protests of insults to their religion.
Maybe it is because the media has traditionally been at the end of the strings of the State[0], so to be surprised about such actions seems kinda naive. Some people probably stopped taking orders…
But it is interesting/amusing to see the State encroaching upon itself and its own devices in the pursuit of terrorism or whatever thing we're supposed to be fighting these days.
Lying to everyone about Benghazi to maintain a narrative about terrorism prior to the election satisfies most people's definition of a scandal. And for some reason the people on the ground, even in the country, were told to stand down rather than attempt to help, something that no one can remember ever happening before.
Really now, this is the first Ambassador killed in the line of duty in 33 years (previously under Carter, of course) and you're sure there's nothing suspect about it?!??!!!
Your claims about the IRS abuse completely fail, since no "progressive" organizations suffered such abuse. One group even resubmitted their application, just changing the name to include the word Green and sound progressive, and it sailed through the process. And stonewalling != investigation, many groups were delayed for 3+ years, two election cycles, and are still left hanging. Compare to many many other examples, like Obama's Organizing for America -> Organizing for Action 501(c)(4).
You may have no problems with the heavy hand of the government suppressing those you politically oppose, but I assure you the other side does, and as I note elsewhere in this subthread this sort of thing has grave consequences.
If it were just about my political preferences, I'd be thrilled that conservatives can't shut up about Benghazi. It didn't play during the last election, it won't play during the next one, and makes Republicans look like frothing at the mouth idiots.
But I'm actually concerned as an American about real issues, even real criticisms of Obama that get no attention while this idiocy goes on.
And this is why they say to keep politics off of HN. None of your assertions are backed up by fact. It's really disheartening to see this nonsense here.
As an American that doesn't care, I can say that the media is in quite a hypocritical situation with this one.
They've had 10 years to look into this, to take a stance, to confront the US Government on the issue. For 10 years they've ignored, or not cared, about issues like wire tapping, searching through emails and phone records, etc without a warrant. Issues like locking up an american citizens indefinitely without a right to trial. Issues like using drones to kill americans.
They've ignored these issues for going on 10 years because, I assume, they felt they were immune to them. That they had protections against them that 'regular' Americans didn't.
Now they find out and they are just as susceptible to those rules as the rest of us an want to put a rallying cry for us to come to their side? Even further they want special legislation protecting them from it, while leaving the rest of us unprotected?
Please. The media deserves absolutely zero sympathy on this one. Maybe if they were doing their jobs, maybe if they actually cared about the American people the way they claim, they wouldn't be in this mess.
I wonder if you oughtn't reconsider how important the IRS+ scandal is (for some targets, it went way past the IRS, even audits by them, e.g for Truth the Vote the FBI, OSHA and BATF all piled on). This systematic suppression by the ruling class* of their opposition implicates the 1st Amendment freedoms of religion†, speech, assembly and petition (e.g. unruly "Town Hall" events).
There's a lot of maxims out there that generally start with "soap box", put ballot box and/or jury box in the middle and end with "bullet box" at the end, and pushing a very large fraction of the polity out of the public square tends to have grave consequences. So far some of them are a massive distrust of one of the essential organs of government (tax collection) and an asterisk that honest historians are going to have to put after mentioning Obama's reelection.
That Team Obama is going after the press just completes the attacks on every single provision of the 1st Amendment (at least if you accept that "secular humanism" or whatever you want to call it is now the established religion, although in all fairness that far predates Obama).
* This is not entirely or perhaps even mostly partisan, for most of the people being suppressed are existential threats to the Republican party establishment, just ask ex-Senator Lugar who's now spending more time with his family. On the other hand, Kimberly Strassle of the WSJ reminds us this started out in 2008 against anyone who opposed Obama, as well as anyone opposing Democrats: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732465940457850...
† Religious organizations were asked impermissible questions that touched on the details of their theology and the like.
You're not contradicting my contention: Lots of political groups were applying for charitable status, they're not allowed to have it, and it's the IRS's job to flag those groups, filter them out and inform them that their donations are not tax-deductible.
Any political group asking for charity status was not being persecuted -- they were being very properly informed that they're not a charity. If any actual charity was caught up in this dragnet, then that charity was persecuted.
Look at it this way: This IRS dept (overseen by a bush appointee) in a particular year sees a lot of bogus charity 501c4 applications using the word "foobar". They set up a filter on the word foobar to flag any entries containing it for manual review. Completely reasonable, right?
Now change "foobar" to "tea party". That's where they screwed up on CYA, they should've added a bunch of democratic party type keywords to the list and then they're good.
You are very confused. 501(c) status is about being a non-profit, not necessarily a "charity". Only a few of the current 27 categories of 501(c) organizations can reasonably be called charities, look at the list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization#Types, e.g. see 501(c)(16) for farmer's coops.
501(c)(4) organizations are mostly not charities, e.g. the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, and the current version of Obama's Organizing for America (Organizing for Action) are examples that passed IRS muster, and the vast majority of the ones maltreated by the IRS were going for that status.
OFA only switched to a tax-exempt organization in January 2013. I don't know the full story behind that, but I feel that their activity before 2013 was primarily political and shouldn't be tax-exempt (and it wasn't).
And their first big campaign as a 501(c)(4) was gun control, and that's not political?
Note, I'm not saying that's wrong, in fact, it mirrors the NRA's ILA on the opposite side of that fight.
Look, we had an established system for doing this sort of thing, and it makes no sense whatsoever to make political organizations organize as for profit entities, monetary return on investment is not their game. And donations for political purposes to 501(c)(4) orgs are not tax deductible for the donors.
What we'd like is a return to the level playing field pre-Obama, but I don't know of anyone who believes that will happen, e.g. the IG finished the audit of the program in the middle of last year, obviously didn't release the results, but most damningly didn't stop the abuse, which continues to this day.
That's actually a legitimate argument. In theory, there could be a tea party group that was doing issue advocacy and not campaigning for candidates. In practice, many of them were in fact advocating for candidates, and the IRS screwed up by not scrutinizing all issue groups equally.
You've actually changed my mind a little on this. I don't believe that this was some nefarious obama socialist plot (under a Bush appointed supervisor) as you seem to but I now think that the IRS actually screwed up as opposed to failed to cover their ass. So good job.
Honest question: If extra review of obviously-political groups calling themselves social welfare organizations were perfectly balanced across the political spectrum, would you support it?
Not sure, I find it impossible to believe that the establishment will give anti-establishment political organizations a fair shake, which is exactly what happened in this scandal. These orgs are not partisan per se, for all I know there's some anti-establishment Democrats out there that they've supported (e.g. many of my home state's Missouri Democratic "liberals" are to the right of the national Republican party/establishment), and they've collected many Republican establishment scalps.
But one of the problems is that before the fact investigation just doesn't work, for how can you tell if an org is going to do impermissible actions? The only one that counts is coordination with a campaign, which is by definition secret, because the other impermissible actions (at least that I know of) are by definition public.
Although, now that I think about it, I'm not sure where the lines are drawn. The NRA-ILA explicitly "endorses" some politicians in addition to grading all they can afford to do, and boy do anti-gun Republicans squeal like stuck pigs when the NRA tells the truth, or, worse, goes after them with a rusty knife like they did with F rated Lugar. So explicit endorsement per se does not cross the line....
Look at the examples of the suppressed orgs that said their purpose was teaching people about the Constitution. That's obviously subversive nowadays (heck, look at the IRS ex-Commissioner I think who said he didn't know the contents of the 1st Amendment), and yet they somehow deserve extra scrutiny?
Look up the concept of prior restraint, which the government is seldom allowed to do when it comes to enumerated Constitutional rights. I.e. they can't order the press to not do something, only prosecute them afterwords.
Adjust their methods, I suggest that this wasn't about having journalist adjust their methods but to intimidate anyone in government from speaking out without approval. Approved leaks, like the recent IRS about targeting specific groups is an example of what is allowed. The leaks to this Fox reporter and the not so long ago prosecution of Thomas Drake are all about silencing people who know whats wrong from talking because now they will get the reporter to reveal their sources directly or indirectly.
I agree. I'm pretty sure Obama does this to create a chilling effect for whistleblowers more than anything else, which means he values government secrecy very highly and it's the exact opposite of what he promised.
The idea that Obama has been more aggressive than Bush in leak investigations is popular, but I'm not sure it's anything more than circumstantial. Here are the leak prosecutions that have actually happened since he took office:
The fact remains (as far as I know) that the Obama administration has prosecuted more leaks under the Espionage Act of 1917 than all other presidents up to now combined. So we have a few possibilities:
1) Obama is prosecuting at the same rate of aggressiveness as previous presidents but has happened to have more prosecutable leaks under his watch than all previous presidents combined.
2) Obama is prosecuting at the same rate of aggressiveness as previous presidents, and there has not been a sudden increase in prosecutable leaks, but Obama has found out about them better, and thus been able to prosecute more.
3) Obama is prosecuting at an increased rate of aggressiveness compared to previous presidents, because there has not been a sudden increase in prosecutable leaks the president knew about
4) It's all irrelevant because comparing 0 vs. 2 vs. 6 prosecutions among 20-some presidents is too small a sample size
There's a lot of missing information here, so it's easy to see how some biases would tend towards 3 and others would tend towards 1-2 or 4
Anybody who compares Nixon to any subsequent US president, even Reagan, is betraying a lack of understanding of how serious Watergate was. There was, at the time, the possibility of a military coup --- and that coup would have been in defense of the Constitution.
Ummm, I was politically aware during all of Watergate and followed it closely, except for the month of camping in Colorado when we heard, upon coming down from the mountain, that Nixon had resigned.
Things were nowhere near that bad---I think you're confusing a coup with refusing illegal orders, and no doubt relaying them to the Congress, and I note that Nixon simply resigned, didn't even have to be formally impeached---and while it's again just my unsupported opinion, the threat to the Republic from the Watergate break in et. al. (which included the IRS refusing to follow Nixon's demands) is much smaller than this IRS scandal, which very possibly threw a presidential election, and has pushed a large fraction of the polity out of the public square. With no one believing any of this will be corrected; heck, the IRS abuse is still going on.
Frankly, I'm reluctantly coming to the opinion that unless the IRS is clubbed like a baby seal, the Republic has fallen.
One of the reasons I discuss stuff like this on Hacker News is that the rule of law and stability are important to the kinds of things we do (look at what the end of the IPO exit has done in the last ~ 10 years). If the Republic truly falls, it's going to have serious knock-on affects to startups in the US, whatever the path that follows, e.g. tyranny and/or civil war.
All the productive action in the PRC tells us the rule of law not as critical as many think, then again, there are limits to what they're achieving, and it took the ending of the period of endless "revolution" for all that to get started (Mao/The Gang of Four being replaced by Deng).
"[...] The president may not realize the cost of reducing the trust content of his actions. Perhaps they teach that lying has no cost in Chicago, but in reality trust’s absence exacts a very definite price.
"The first thing to remember is that trust exists for very good reason, even among gangsters. In ordinary commerce its value is obvious. Many products rely on trust: the security of our communications and data storage; the integrity of accounting; the impartiality of the public institutions. Whether we are using Office 360, email, or Google Drive, a medical storage device that stores our sugar levels and blood pressure numbers or files an income tax return, the presumption is that the information we generate is reasonably private. Once that expectation is destroyed, once we are certain that a political hack whose principal qualification is snooping has been appointed to head Obamacare, then an economic cost is inevitably incurred.
"Lying isn’t free.
"One of the reasons that the United States has remained the last refuge for money fleeing instability abroad is that those investors trust its institutions. They believed — reasonably until now — that in America the rule of law reigned supreme. They thought — until the administration cast the question into serious doubt — that America was not the banana republic that the possessors of those fortunes sought to flee. That’s why the money comes to America and not, let us say, to the Congo."
Between signing off on warrants against journalists, signing off on the CIA murdering American citizens abroad (via OLC), and giving de facto immunity to banks and bank employees, Holder has been a terrible Attorney General.
DOJ regulations require that the AG approve ('sign off' on) the request for a warrant targeting a journalist, but you are right that only a judge (well at least a magistrate) can actually authorize one.
I fail to see how it is newsworthy that the AG requested a warrant unless there's some kind of a trend that AG approved requests are disproportionately granted.
The reason that the AG has to sign off on the request, as opposed to the usual process where a line prosecutor a few years out of law school does so on his own initiative, is because of the acknowledged conflicts of values inherent in investigating journalists for doing their jobs.
So even the DOJ acknowledges it's something of a big deal, they just argue it was justified in this instance.
I thought informed people knew by now that the public narrative regarding fast and furious was completely fabricated? I can't recall the article off the top of my head, but it has long been shown that this operation was in fact not the policy of the DOJ, but that bureaucratic nonsense and politics at the state level actually prevented the agents on the field from intercepting the guns.
Informed people know the BATF never made any attempt to track the guns whatsoever (unlike the previous Boooosh "Wide Receiver" where they put tracking and transmitting devices in the stocks of the guns, but abandoned the effort after about 200 guns since the approach wasn't working).
There's some telling emails that have surfaced that indicate the sole purpose was to generate more statistics about guns of American origin fueling the drug war, there's also indications this was supplying one faction, the Sinaloa Cartel, since their opponents, Los Zetas, are by far the most dangerous and a potential existential threat to the Mexican government). And all during this period Team Obama were telling lies about the fraction of guns that fuel the drug war down south that come from civilian US sources, trying to make a case for more gun control in the US, and illegally doing so by ordering gun shops to report multiple rifle sales.
"In February 2011, [CBS reporter Sharyl] Attkisson wrote a landmark report about the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, which earned her an Emmy award. Months later, she went on Ingraham’s radio show and said that officials from both the White House and the Justice Department had yelled and screamed at her because of her report."
> I DO think it's wrong to target bona fide journalists for criminal prosecution based on their reporting.
I'm not sure there's any indication that they were really going to prosecute a journalist, though, was there?
I know the way the warrants were written probably sounds like it implies that. But I think they were using the fact that the journalist technically broke the law to fish for information about the guy they were really targeting: whoever leaked the info.
Now, you might well have a problem with that intent, the current law, or the way they obtained the warrants. But saying that the current administration was actually going to prosecute the journalist seems to me unfounded.
Oh boy.
When you ask government a question they can tell its classified.
But if you dare not to comply with government, you are in so much trouble :D
And there the illusion shatters where government is for the people.
I didn't read the article, but I've heard nothing about him targeting _the journalist_ for prosecution. They are trying to target the leaker for disseminating classified information, and got a warrant to search the email account of the person he leaked to.
By far the best part of this whole affair has been the journalistic pearl-clutching, as if they would be immune the the same laws permitting such invasions of privact that they covered being passed without uttering a peep. But if a bunch of college students or people with a suspiciously non-caucasian complexion have the same thing happen to them then its fine.
Since you seem to be new around here: Please don't start a post with I didn't read the article. Some people on this site put a decent amount of work into their comments. So please spend at least the 5 minutes skimming through the article before making a statement.
"Based on the above, there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter (along with Mr. Kim [the prosecuted government employee]) has committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 789(d) either as Mr. Kim's co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor..." which continues with the email account to be searched, more justification, etc.
Unprecedented in recent history going back to at least the Pentagon Papers?
Someone leaked top secret information that may have led to the death of a high level North Korean administrator that was a US intelligence asset.
1.) Should the person be prosecuted
2.) Should the journalist who facilitated the leak of that information be immune to legal search warrants
3.) Should the journalist who facilitated the leak be prosecuted.
I believe 1, 2 are yes. 3 is no.
I have no idea about recent history, honestly. I don't really care, either.
I'm not new to here. I just created a throwaway to say a few things in another thread. I didn't read it because I was already familiar with the story. I have never cared so much for the amount of effort involved in things, just the value that said thing provides. Best regards.
> wrong to target bona fide journalists for criminal prosecution
I'm curious to know how you feel about Wikileaks. Part of the problem, I think, is that much of the media (including Fox) more or less cheered the administration on in its pursuit of Wikileaks. Journalism is an act and has a broad scope. Just as bloggers are journalists (finally recognized in recent years), people who accept documents and disseminate the information contained within those documents are, must be, journalists. As long as the media continue to try to draw a weirdly-shaped line between themselves and groups like Wikileaks, there will be no clear protection for journalists.
Aside from conspiracy theories regarding CIA pressure on Swedish prosecutors has the US government actually gone after the wikileaks organization at all? There were certain calls from individual congressmen and, as you mention, journalists, to do so, but I don't remember anything ever coming of it.
If I'm honest, I feel like Wikileaks started off as a good idea and somehow morphed into something else.
Journalism is an enterprise that commands a great deal of power. With that power comes a great deal of responsibility.
I don't think that Wikileaks used that power responsibly. I also feel like Wikileaks was more akin to a propaganda campaign by a single charismatic man with a little too much anarchist in him.
So while I think it goes too far to call Assange a "conspirator", I don't think he did himself any favors in the process of disseminating his acquired information.
It's important to remember that intent matters. Wikileaks was trying to subvert the ability of governments to operate in secret and thus reduce their power. He wasn't trying to inform the people about things done in their name.
The NYTimes isn't trying to bring down a government. I feel like Wikileaks was.
So then what is Fox? They seem to be trying pretty hard to reduce the power of certain elements within the government. Whatever your political stripe, I think we can agree that Fox, MSNBC and similar do a great deal more than simply "inform the public". So does Fox even have a right to complain by your standards?
The problem with involving things like "intent" is that it makes the line between "journalism" and "not journalism" murky and impossible to define clearly. This means that true protection for journalists is impossible since they will always have an uncertain status.
What was widely considered to be journalism on September 10, 2001 was considered by many to be borderline treason on September 12, 2001 (remember when GWB had a 90% approval rating?). The intent might not have changed ("inform the public") but the public perception of the intent changed radically.
Further, if the effect of the dissemination is taken into account in the definition of "journalism", then it is impossible to know a priori whether disseminating a given piece of information will be considered journalism or not. How can the NYT be sure that they won't accidentally spark a revolution? Further, isn't there a fairly extensive history of newspapers directly calling for various forms of revolution?
So the only way to really protect journalists is to define journalism broadly and objectively. Disseminating information, regardless of motive, must be considered journalism then. This means that Wikileaks must qualify for protection just as the NYT does.
Note: I'm not saying the government can't go after people who break their various responsibilities related to keeping secrets. I'm also not saying that simply making crap up and publishing it should be protected, but the laws related to these things are well-established and relatively uncontroversial.
>As a reporter, you're allowed to ask a question. You have no right to information a source is legally required to withhold. That said, if they violate that requirement, it's not your fault. Obtaining the private emails of journalists is crossing a line. It makes it impossible for a journalist to guarantee the safety of their sources.
This statement seems self-contradictory. If a person leaking classified information does not warrant protection, then it is in fact legitimate to subpoena the private emails of a journalist who is known to be in contact with said person. They are using their ability to access private information under extraordinary circumstances to find someone who is breaking the law. This seems perfectly legitimate. The fact that the information belongs to a journalist doesn't necessitate extra levels of protection against wiretapping warrants--if whatever information was sensitive enough to justify a wiretap on an arbitrary (uninvolved) person, that person being a journalist shouldn't matter. The journalist isn't being targeted, so him being a journalist is irrelevant.
It sounds like there was an actual warrant in this case? Not a huge fan of the actions taken here but it's not as horrendous as the end run around oversight that the subpoenas entail.
I am not a lawyer, but my naive understanding of how it works is that a judge (or magistrate, somesuch from judicial branch) "signs off" on a warrant to authorize it. Maybe the article means that the AG approved requesting a warrant from a judge?
I seem to remember reading somewhere that there are extra procedures in the Justice Department when issuing search warrants involving members of the press. Namely, that the AG has to sign off personally. I'll see if I can find a source.
Edit: Yes. The AG has to personally sign off on them.
"Justice Department regulations call for subpoenas for journalists’ phone records to be undertaken as a last resort and narrowly focused, subject to the attorney general’s personal signoff. Under normal circumstances, the regulations call for notice and negotiations, giving the news organization a chance to challenge the subpoena in court."
That's more or less my understanding - the AG approved requesting a warrant from a judge, which approval is required in certain cases for whatever reason.
This is different than the subpoenas, which skip the judge altogether.
I agree that the less politics on Hacker News, the better. However, I think there is a grave risk in writing off the possible abuse of political power because the alleged victims are not in your camp. As Martin Niemöller said:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
This isn't a left-wing or right-wing issue, it's a civil-liberties issue concerning life in a free society. The press, while not one of the checks & balances envisioned by the country founders, serve in that role by revealing the misdeeds & transgressions of those in positions of authority.
Slashdot is right wing? Bahahaha. That's funny. Did you know CmdrTaco actually works for the Washington Post now? Not exactly the fortress of the right wing. In fact, quite liberal. Some would say very liberal.
Anywho, this topic is about government abuse, regardless of party.
Washington Post isn't liberal or conservative. It's beltway. If one party says that the sky is yellow, and the other party says it's red, the Washington Post will be there in all their wisdom to inform you that it's actually a shade of orange, and they're the mature adults who can rise above partisanship and see the truth.
I wish that was still true, it was when I was living in the area 1991-2004. But to me at least they've abandoned that position; that they still employ Ezra Klein after his JournoList was exposed tells you all you need to know. Heck, he and Josh Marshall were just observed going into the White House for a private meeting and now they're saying the same things.
Take a look at their front-page right now. Or tomorrow. The whole op/ed section is filled with the same crap that every politician is talking about. Strategically balanced so that they're acting as stenographer for both side's media consultant.
Like chiph I look at this as more of a civil liberties issue. There's always been a strong civil liberties contingent on HN, so while most political stories aren't fit for HN, I can see why this one has caught some peoples' attention here.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadI don't think there is anything wrong in pursuing illegal leaks of classified information. I DO think it's wrong to target bona fide journalists for criminal prosecution based on their reporting. The optics of this kind of thing are bad no matter how you look at it.
As a reporter, you're allowed to ask a question. You have no right to information a source is legally required to withhold. That said, if they violate that requirement, it's not your fault. Obtaining the private emails of journalists is crossing a line. It makes it impossible for a journalist to guarantee the safety of their sources.
I think Holder is on pretty thin ice here and generations of future journalists are going to look at what happened and adjust their methods. As citizens, we have a right to know what our government does even if it doesn't want us to.
If a person with information decides to risk their freedom so that citizens can be informed, that's their choice. Attacking the fifth estate will make revolutionaries of us all.
Can Fox News sue here? It seems like calling him a co-conspirator (aka journalist) just to get the search warrant with no plans to charge him is super fishy.
And even more puzzling than Holder's actions, why isn't Fox News trumpeting this instead of Benghazi?
I also think it's sketchy as hell to name someone as a 'co-conspirator' in a leak case for being a journalist who was leaked to. That's not conspiracy, it's doing their job with protection from the first amendment.
But let's put things in context. The IRS scandal, and especially the Benghazi one, have been trumpeted at least 10x more than the AP one. Maybe 100x more. With such "awareness campaign" is it really a surprise most people responded in the surveys with IRS or Benghazi?
So what this really means is that the media themselves don't really care about the AP spying - which is actually quite frightening, and a worse situation than I thought. You'd think they would want to turn this into another Watergate or something - but apparently not. Same for the Fox News journalist.
These two stories would be reason enough to call for the impeachment of the president in my book. I mean it threatens a core power in the society - the press. The Benghazi story, and even the IRS one to "some" degree, are the real distractions here.
There's not an actual scandal behind Benghazi. Literally none. They're alleging a cover-up, "of what?", "they're covering it up!". That's the whole story and somehow it's 6 months of airtime.
The IRS story is just bad CYA by the administrators there. Political groups applying for charity status is in fact something that the IRS should be auditing and cracking down on, regardless of political party, and there were a lot of tea party groups applying for charity status -- The dept head was actually a Bush appointee, they just weren't tactful enough about how they set their filters to make it look more bipartisan.
This leak case, on the other hand, is actual erosion of press freedoms. And the media (?!?!?!!) seem to care the least about it.
So much that, it is easier for reasonable people to assume there's nothing to any of it other than political attacks when in fact there clearly was some kind of bureaucratic ineptitude and they were officially blaming a YouTube video for weeks.
Brandon Webb and the guys over at SOFREP have been doing a fair bit of reporting on the subject. tl;dr: Benghazi was a colossal screwup and exposed how JSOC operations in the area put State Department people at risk.
But the "scandal" hasn't been about who screwed up. It's been about whether Obama used the word terrorism enough times in the aftermath, and nebulous accusations of "cover-up" with no actual allegations of wrongdoing that's being covered up. It's pathetic.
But it is interesting/amusing to see the State encroaching upon itself and its own devices in the pursuit of terrorism or whatever thing we're supposed to be fighting these days.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
Really now, this is the first Ambassador killed in the line of duty in 33 years (previously under Carter, of course) and you're sure there's nothing suspect about it?!??!!!
Your claims about the IRS abuse completely fail, since no "progressive" organizations suffered such abuse. One group even resubmitted their application, just changing the name to include the word Green and sound progressive, and it sailed through the process. And stonewalling != investigation, many groups were delayed for 3+ years, two election cycles, and are still left hanging. Compare to many many other examples, like Obama's Organizing for America -> Organizing for Action 501(c)(4).
You may have no problems with the heavy hand of the government suppressing those you politically oppose, but I assure you the other side does, and as I note elsewhere in this subthread this sort of thing has grave consequences.
But I'm actually concerned as an American about real issues, even real criticisms of Obama that get no attention while this idiocy goes on.
They've had 10 years to look into this, to take a stance, to confront the US Government on the issue. For 10 years they've ignored, or not cared, about issues like wire tapping, searching through emails and phone records, etc without a warrant. Issues like locking up an american citizens indefinitely without a right to trial. Issues like using drones to kill americans.
They've ignored these issues for going on 10 years because, I assume, they felt they were immune to them. That they had protections against them that 'regular' Americans didn't.
Now they find out and they are just as susceptible to those rules as the rest of us an want to put a rallying cry for us to come to their side? Even further they want special legislation protecting them from it, while leaving the rest of us unprotected?
Please. The media deserves absolutely zero sympathy on this one. Maybe if they were doing their jobs, maybe if they actually cared about the American people the way they claim, they wouldn't be in this mess.
There's a lot of maxims out there that generally start with "soap box", put ballot box and/or jury box in the middle and end with "bullet box" at the end, and pushing a very large fraction of the polity out of the public square tends to have grave consequences. So far some of them are a massive distrust of one of the essential organs of government (tax collection) and an asterisk that honest historians are going to have to put after mentioning Obama's reelection.
That Team Obama is going after the press just completes the attacks on every single provision of the 1st Amendment (at least if you accept that "secular humanism" or whatever you want to call it is now the established religion, although in all fairness that far predates Obama).
* This is not entirely or perhaps even mostly partisan, for most of the people being suppressed are existential threats to the Republican party establishment, just ask ex-Senator Lugar who's now spending more time with his family. On the other hand, Kimberly Strassle of the WSJ reminds us this started out in 2008 against anyone who opposed Obama, as well as anyone opposing Democrats: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732465940457850...
† Religious organizations were asked impermissible questions that touched on the details of their theology and the like.
Any political group asking for charity status was not being persecuted -- they were being very properly informed that they're not a charity. If any actual charity was caught up in this dragnet, then that charity was persecuted.
Look at it this way: This IRS dept (overseen by a bush appointee) in a particular year sees a lot of bogus charity 501c4 applications using the word "foobar". They set up a filter on the word foobar to flag any entries containing it for manual review. Completely reasonable, right?
Now change "foobar" to "tea party". That's where they screwed up on CYA, they should've added a bunch of democratic party type keywords to the list and then they're good.
501(c)(4) organizations are mostly not charities, e.g. the NRA's lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, and the current version of Obama's Organizing for America (Organizing for Action) are examples that passed IRS muster, and the vast majority of the ones maltreated by the IRS were going for that status.
Note, I'm not saying that's wrong, in fact, it mirrors the NRA's ILA on the opposite side of that fight.
Look, we had an established system for doing this sort of thing, and it makes no sense whatsoever to make political organizations organize as for profit entities, monetary return on investment is not their game. And donations for political purposes to 501(c)(4) orgs are not tax deductible for the donors.
What we'd like is a return to the level playing field pre-Obama, but I don't know of anyone who believes that will happen, e.g. the IG finished the audit of the program in the middle of last year, obviously didn't release the results, but most damningly didn't stop the abuse, which continues to this day.
You've actually changed my mind a little on this. I don't believe that this was some nefarious obama socialist plot (under a Bush appointed supervisor) as you seem to but I now think that the IRS actually screwed up as opposed to failed to cover their ass. So good job.
Honest question: If extra review of obviously-political groups calling themselves social welfare organizations were perfectly balanced across the political spectrum, would you support it?
But one of the problems is that before the fact investigation just doesn't work, for how can you tell if an org is going to do impermissible actions? The only one that counts is coordination with a campaign, which is by definition secret, because the other impermissible actions (at least that I know of) are by definition public.
Although, now that I think about it, I'm not sure where the lines are drawn. The NRA-ILA explicitly "endorses" some politicians in addition to grading all they can afford to do, and boy do anti-gun Republicans squeal like stuck pigs when the NRA tells the truth, or, worse, goes after them with a rusty knife like they did with F rated Lugar. So explicit endorsement per se does not cross the line....
Look at the examples of the suppressed orgs that said their purpose was teaching people about the Constitution. That's obviously subversive nowadays (heck, look at the IRS ex-Commissioner I think who said he didn't know the contents of the 1st Amendment), and yet they somehow deserve extra scrutiny?
Look up the concept of prior restraint, which the government is seldom allowed to do when it comes to enumerated Constitutional rights. I.e. they can't order the press to not do something, only prosecute them afterwords.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5701813
1) Obama is prosecuting at the same rate of aggressiveness as previous presidents but has happened to have more prosecutable leaks under his watch than all previous presidents combined.
2) Obama is prosecuting at the same rate of aggressiveness as previous presidents, and there has not been a sudden increase in prosecutable leaks, but Obama has found out about them better, and thus been able to prosecute more.
3) Obama is prosecuting at an increased rate of aggressiveness compared to previous presidents, because there has not been a sudden increase in prosecutable leaks the president knew about
4) It's all irrelevant because comparing 0 vs. 2 vs. 6 prosecutions among 20-some presidents is too small a sample size
There's a lot of missing information here, so it's easy to see how some biases would tend towards 3 and others would tend towards 1-2 or 4
You only need one Watergate to bring down a president.
Fixed it for you.
Things were nowhere near that bad---I think you're confusing a coup with refusing illegal orders, and no doubt relaying them to the Congress, and I note that Nixon simply resigned, didn't even have to be formally impeached---and while it's again just my unsupported opinion, the threat to the Republic from the Watergate break in et. al. (which included the IRS refusing to follow Nixon's demands) is much smaller than this IRS scandal, which very possibly threw a presidential election, and has pushed a large fraction of the polity out of the public square. With no one believing any of this will be corrected; heck, the IRS abuse is still going on.
Frankly, I'm reluctantly coming to the opinion that unless the IRS is clubbed like a baby seal, the Republic has fallen.
All the productive action in the PRC tells us the rule of law not as critical as many think, then again, there are limits to what they're achieving, and it took the ending of the period of endless "revolution" for all that to get started (Mao/The Gang of Four being replaced by Deng).
There's also this detail about investing and doing business, from Richard "Wretchard" Fernandez (http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/05/16/the-lying-kin...):
"[...] The president may not realize the cost of reducing the trust content of his actions. Perhaps they teach that lying has no cost in Chicago, but in reality trust’s absence exacts a very definite price.
"The first thing to remember is that trust exists for very good reason, even among gangsters. In ordinary commerce its value is obvious. Many products rely on trust: the security of our communications and data storage; the integrity of accounting; the impartiality of the public institutions. Whether we are using Office 360, email, or Google Drive, a medical storage device that stores our sugar levels and blood pressure numbers or files an income tax return, the presumption is that the information we generate is reasonably private. Once that expectation is destroyed, once we are certain that a political hack whose principal qualification is snooping has been appointed to head Obamacare, then an economic cost is inevitably incurred.
"Lying isn’t free.
"One of the reasons that the United States has remained the last refuge for money fleeing instability abroad is that those investors trust its institutions. They believed — reasonably until now — that in America the rule of law reigned supreme. They thought — until the administration cast the question into serious doubt — that America was not the banana republic that the possessors of those fortunes sought to flee. That’s why the money comes to America and not, let us say, to the Congo."
It's time for him to go.
So even the DOJ acknowledges it's something of a big deal, they just argue it was justified in this instance.
There's some telling emails that have surfaced that indicate the sole purpose was to generate more statistics about guns of American origin fueling the drug war, there's also indications this was supplying one faction, the Sinaloa Cartel, since their opponents, Los Zetas, are by far the most dangerous and a potential existential threat to the Mexican government). And all during this period Team Obama were telling lies about the fraction of guns that fuel the drug war down south that come from civilian US sources, trying to make a case for more gun control in the US, and illegally doing so by ordering gun shops to report multiple rifle sales.
"In February 2011, [CBS reporter Sharyl] Attkisson wrote a landmark report about the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal, which earned her an Emmy award. Months later, she went on Ingraham’s radio show and said that officials from both the White House and the Justice Department had yelled and screamed at her because of her report."
I'm not sure there's any indication that they were really going to prosecute a journalist, though, was there?
I know the way the warrants were written probably sounds like it implies that. But I think they were using the fact that the journalist technically broke the law to fish for information about the guy they were really targeting: whoever leaked the info.
Now, you might well have a problem with that intent, the current law, or the way they obtained the warrants. But saying that the current administration was actually going to prosecute the journalist seems to me unfounded.
By far the best part of this whole affair has been the journalistic pearl-clutching, as if they would be immune the the same laws permitting such invasions of privact that they covered being passed without uttering a peep. But if a bunch of college students or people with a suspiciously non-caucasian complexion have the same thing happen to them then its fine.
From the article. So in spite of not reading the article, their comment was correct.
You do know that it is believed that someone died as a result of this leak?
"Based on the above, there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter (along with Mr. Kim [the prosecuted government employee]) has committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 789(d) either as Mr. Kim's co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor..." which continues with the email account to be searched, more justification, etc.
Unprecedented in recent history going back to at least the Pentagon Papers?
1.) Should the person be prosecuted 2.) Should the journalist who facilitated the leak of that information be immune to legal search warrants 3.) Should the journalist who facilitated the leak be prosecuted.
I believe 1, 2 are yes. 3 is no.
I have no idea about recent history, honestly. I don't really care, either.
I'm curious to know how you feel about Wikileaks. Part of the problem, I think, is that much of the media (including Fox) more or less cheered the administration on in its pursuit of Wikileaks. Journalism is an act and has a broad scope. Just as bloggers are journalists (finally recognized in recent years), people who accept documents and disseminate the information contained within those documents are, must be, journalists. As long as the media continue to try to draw a weirdly-shaped line between themselves and groups like Wikileaks, there will be no clear protection for journalists.
Journalism is an enterprise that commands a great deal of power. With that power comes a great deal of responsibility.
I don't think that Wikileaks used that power responsibly. I also feel like Wikileaks was more akin to a propaganda campaign by a single charismatic man with a little too much anarchist in him.
So while I think it goes too far to call Assange a "conspirator", I don't think he did himself any favors in the process of disseminating his acquired information.
It's important to remember that intent matters. Wikileaks was trying to subvert the ability of governments to operate in secret and thus reduce their power. He wasn't trying to inform the people about things done in their name.
The NYTimes isn't trying to bring down a government. I feel like Wikileaks was.
edit:typo
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/
The problem with involving things like "intent" is that it makes the line between "journalism" and "not journalism" murky and impossible to define clearly. This means that true protection for journalists is impossible since they will always have an uncertain status.
What was widely considered to be journalism on September 10, 2001 was considered by many to be borderline treason on September 12, 2001 (remember when GWB had a 90% approval rating?). The intent might not have changed ("inform the public") but the public perception of the intent changed radically.
Further, if the effect of the dissemination is taken into account in the definition of "journalism", then it is impossible to know a priori whether disseminating a given piece of information will be considered journalism or not. How can the NYT be sure that they won't accidentally spark a revolution? Further, isn't there a fairly extensive history of newspapers directly calling for various forms of revolution?
So the only way to really protect journalists is to define journalism broadly and objectively. Disseminating information, regardless of motive, must be considered journalism then. This means that Wikileaks must qualify for protection just as the NYT does.
Note: I'm not saying the government can't go after people who break their various responsibilities related to keeping secrets. I'm also not saying that simply making crap up and publishing it should be protected, but the laws related to these things are well-established and relatively uncontroversial.
This statement seems self-contradictory. If a person leaking classified information does not warrant protection, then it is in fact legitimate to subpoena the private emails of a journalist who is known to be in contact with said person. They are using their ability to access private information under extraordinary circumstances to find someone who is breaking the law. This seems perfectly legitimate. The fact that the information belongs to a journalist doesn't necessitate extra levels of protection against wiretapping warrants--if whatever information was sensitive enough to justify a wiretap on an arbitrary (uninvolved) person, that person being a journalist shouldn't matter. The journalist isn't being targeted, so him being a journalist is irrelevant.
http://www.newyorker.com/strongbox/
Edit: Yes. The AG has to personally sign off on them.
"Justice Department regulations call for subpoenas for journalists’ phone records to be undertaken as a last resort and narrowly focused, subject to the attorney general’s personal signoff. Under normal circumstances, the regulations call for notice and negotiations, giving the news organization a chance to challenge the subpoena in court."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/phone-records-of-journa...
Double Edit: I guess that just references phone records. It's not clear if it includes all types of summons.
This is different than the subpoenas, which skip the judge altogether.
If I wanted right-wing skewed tech news, there is already Slashdot.
First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
Anywho, this topic is about government abuse, regardless of party.
Take a look at their front-page right now. Or tomorrow. The whole op/ed section is filled with the same crap that every politician is talking about. Strategically balanced so that they're acting as stenographer for both side's media consultant.