Obama DOJ "Secretly Obtained" Press Phone Records for Two Months
The 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, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.
According to AP, the federal "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."
AP reports that it has sent a letter of protest saying, "There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters."
The AP also report that the "government would not say why it sought the records."
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