AP: Sources Aren’t Talking To Us Out Of Fear The US Government Will Spy On Them

May 21, 2013




The Obama administration’s decision to seize phone records from the Associated Press was “unconstitutional” and sends a message that “if you talk to the press, we are going to go after you”, the news agency’s boss Gary Pruitt said Sunday.

AP revealed last week that the Justice Department had obtained two months’ worth of phone records of calls made by reporters and editors without informing the organisation in advance. The move was an apparent effort by US officials to identify the source of a story about the CIA foiling an alleged terrorist plot by an al Qaida terrorist affiliate in Yemen.



News of the seizure has caused a political firestorm and comes amid a widening scandal into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups over their tax exemptions and the White House’s handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack last year.
Speaking on CBS‘s Face the Nation, Pruitt, AP’s president and chief executive officer, said the government’s seizure of the phone records was “unconstitutional” and was already clearly harming the press’s ability to do its job.



“We don’t question their right to conduct these sort of investigations. We just think they went about it the wrong way. So sweeping, so secretly, so abusively and harassingly and over-broad that it constitutes, that it is, an unconstitutional act,” he said.



“We are already seeing some impact. Already officials that would normally talk to us and people we talk to in the normal course of newsgathering are already saying to us that they are a little reluctant to talk to us. They fear that they will be monitored by the government. We are already seeing that. It’s not hypothetical,” said Pruitt.



AP: Sources Aren’t Talking To Us Out Of Fear The US Government Will Spy On Them [continued]


Related posts:

  1. DOJ Secretly Obtains Months Of AP Phone Records; AP Condemns ‘Unprecedented Intrusion’
  2. National Journal’s Ron Fournier Obama’s ‘Chilling’ Message To Whistleblowers: ‘We’re Watching You’
  3. Benghazi Talking Points Underwent 12 Revisions, Scrubbed Of Terror Reference — Risk Of Impeachment
  4. Obama Rejects Calls For Independent Probe Of IRS Scandal
  5. The Politics of Fear in America: A Nation at War with Itself


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