Obama spies on the Media for months - Welcome to the Police State



Welcome to the Police State

With "security" as the excuse, Obama spies on the U.S. free press

• Don't worry.  Our Dear Leader is not trying to intimidate the press.  He is simply gathering a list of any free thinking reporters and their private conversations with confidential sources.  You just never know when that private information could come in handy for blackmail . . . I mean "national security".

The Chilling Effect  -  Think of all the news stories that will not be written because both reporters and anonymous sources will be living in fear that the All-Powerful State will be recording their every word by phone or e-mail.

Comrade Obama's Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, 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, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters reports the Associated Press.

In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and destruction of all copies.

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. 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 AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said.

The government would not say why it sought the records.


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In the letter notifying the AP received Friday, the Justice Department offered no explanation for the seizure, according to Pruitt's letter and attorneys for the AP. The records were presumably obtained from phone companies earlier this year although the government letter did not explain that. None of the information provided by the government to the AP suggested the actual phone conversations were monitored.

Among those whose phone numbers were obtained were five reporters and an editor who were involved in a May 7, 2012 story.

The Obama administration has aggressively investigated disclosures of classified information to the media and has brought six cases against people suspected of providing classified information, more than under all previous presidents combined.

News organizations normally are notified in advance that the government wants phone records and enter into negotiations over the desired information. In this case, however, the government, in its letter to the AP, cited an exemption to those rules that holds that prior notification can be waived if such notice, in the exemption's wording, might "pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation."

It is unknown whether a judge or a grand jury signed off on the subpoenas.

Dr. Strangelove
The so-called "small government" Republican Party has morphed into a sick Fascist Dr. Strangelove by supporting the unconstitutional centralization of police state power.



The GOP has morphed into Dr. Strangelove.
Instead of being an opposition party and standing tall for the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, the "Conservative" Republican Party in Congress has fallen all over themselves to support and fund every possible Big Brother Police State bill that has come before them.