The story of wiretapping a reporter did not begin last month with James Rosen, back in 2006, a panel of three federal appeals court judges in New York struggled to decide whether a prosecutor should be allowed to see the phone records of two New York Times reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, in an effort to determine their sources for articles about Islamic charities.
One of the Judges of that panel, Judge Robert D. Sack recited lines from the movie "All the President's Men" when forming his arguments. He spoke of the part where Bob Woodward, in the process of unraveling the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post, meets his source in an underground parking garage.
“First of all,” Judge Sack asked, “do you really have to meet in a garage to maintain your confidentiality? Second of all, can the government go and subpoena the surveillance camera?”Six years and six press leak prosecutions later, those questions seem as naive as their answers are obvious: yes and yes.
It used to be that journalists had a sporting chance of protecting their sources. The best and sometimes only way to identify a leaker was to pressure the reporter or news organization that received the leak, but even subpoenas tended to be resisted. Crazy talk about the freedom of the press kept being brought up. Today, advances in surveillance technology allow the government to keep a perpetual eye on those with security clearances, and give prosecutors the ability to punish officials for disclosing secrets without provoking a clash with the press.
But in today's government structure, the ability for the watchmen of our secrets to maintain them as such is inhibited. We live in a world where data flows too easily, to too many people, at such speeds and frequency that oversight is impossible, the perfect example of this issue can be explained in one proper name, Edward Snowden.
The tools that allow a person to keep a secret for themselves no longer apply in such a huge superstructure. Information needs to change hands, be reviewed, and ultimately end up in the correct hands for it to be actionable and worthy of being gathered in the first place. So rather then trying to find the leak that is causing this seepage of information, the government has decided to go after then sponge that is socking our secrets up. My crude metaphor is of course, meant to refer to the government pursuing the persons who are publishing the secrets, rather then those who share them.
The changes have unsettled a decades-long accommodation between national security and press freedom, one in which the government did what it could to protect its secrets but exercised discretion in resorting to subpoenas and criminal charges when it failed. Even the administration of George W. Bush, no friend of leaks, more or less stuck to this script.
That does not seem to be the view of the Obama administration's Justice Department, which has used the tools of the Patriot Act and other recently made legal avenues to bring more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined.
To what end does this new culture of pursuing these links lead? An obvious conclusion would be that it increases the level of paranoia of those within the system, feeling eyes lurk over them every time they hit 'send' on an email, causing high levels of anxiety that a misstep or a mistake could lead towards a leak investigation. This adds a second layer of 'security' around the governments secret keeping apparatus as information that could or would normally be shared with the general public as a way of maintaining the public trust begins to become omitted out of fear of prosecution. The shining example of that is a bureaucratic being led in front of congress to give testimony only to claim innocence and then claim the fifth.
We, the people, are left forced to trust a system that forces itself to be less trustworthy. The government won their case in a 2-1 decision against the ability for the press to maintain their leaks confidentiality back in '06. Opening the way for these historic levels of prosecutions. In a dissent, Judge Sack said he feared for the future.
Part 1: Too Many Parts
Part 2: What is Sacred?
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