ACLU rips into Obama on press spying

America  -  The New Banana Republic

Press intimidation. Warrantless wiretapping. Centralized police power.

Constitution?  What Constitution?

The Obama regime’s atrocious violation against the nation’s free press is the sort of thing you see in communist regimes or dictatorships (like China and Cuba), a deplorable act few imagined would ever take place in the United States.

For a period of two months, the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) secretly obtained the phone records of reporters and editors at one of the nation’s largest news organizations, the Associated Press (AP), in an apparent effort to pin down the source of a leak. This includes records for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters and editors as well as general office numbers for the news organization in several states. [...] reports Judicial Watch.

No one ever imagined that Big Brother would watch this closely. Even the president’s staunchest supporters, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has colluded with the DOJ on a variety of matters, chastised the administration. In a statement posted on its website the famously liberal civil rights group reminds that the media’s purpose is to keep the public informed and it should be free to do so without the threat of unwarranted surveillance.


Surveillance Drones Spying on Civilians

“The Attorney General must explain the Justice Department’s actions to the public so that we can make sure this kind of press intimidation does not happen again,” said Laura Murphy, the director of the ACLU’s Washington D.C. branch. The head of the group’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, Ben Wizner, called the DOJ’s violation “an unacceptable abuse of power,” pointing out that freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy.

Indeed the Obama administration’s actions “shock the American conscience and violate the critical freedom of the press protected by the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” according to the Newspaper Association of America, the nonprofit that represents thousands of publications in the U.S. and Canada. “Americans demand a full accounting,” the group’s president says.

Ironically, President Obama loves to celebrate World Press Freedom Day by calling on governments around the globe to protect the ability of journalists, Bloggers and dissidents to write and speak freely without retribution

"Democracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."
John Adams
An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 1763