Journalistic confidentiality

The records of outgoing calls of over 100 US journalists are now in the hands of the US government.

US President Barack Obama is used to getting flak from the right, but when it comes to the Associated Press (AP) scandal, he’s been at the receiving end of both liberals and right-wingers. At the heart of this affair is what seems to be a steady encroachment by a surveillance state on civil liberties that most Americans take for granted. Ever since the war on terror began, those liberties have been slowly ceded in the name of security. Now, the US Department of Justice has, in a break from its past practices, seized records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to AP journalists in April and May of 2012.

Effectively, this means that the records of outgoing calls of over 100 journalists are now in the hands of the US government. The reason for this unprecedented move is purportedly to uncover a leak that led to information about a CIA operation — aimed at preventing a terror attack — being obtained by AP. While this is being condemned as a violation of basic rights, it is, in fact, not illegal. Thanks to a 2008 revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which President Obama backed when he was a senator, telecommunication companies that reveal their phone logs to the government cannot be held liable. Previously, the Department of Justice would have to subpoena a reporter and drag them through long, public hearings in order to get the information they need, but with this revision, they no longer even need to ask.

Moreover, the immunity of telecommunication companies means that the Department of Justice has even greater incentives to ask for such information, knowing that the companies will not hesitate to hand it over. Ultimately, the only check on the abuse of this power is in the hands of the US executive itself, something that does not bode well for the future of electronic privacy in the United States, or the prospects of journalistic confidentiality. In the coming years, the US could be a bad place to be a whistle-blower in.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 17^th, 2013.