In the days to come we as reporters will need all the tools that we can get. This is a first feeble attempt:(This is not just the present administration but seems to be an American, Canadian, British trent of government restriction, using the terror threat,the fear threat to restrict and destroy freedom. They won. How Journalists Can Protect Themselves From the U.S. Government By Dan Gillmor | Posted Wednesday, May 15, 2013, at 5:42 PM White House press secretary Jay Carney has recently faced questions related to the Justice Department's subpeona of two months of Associated Press journalists' phone records. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images It is beginning to dawn on America's journalists—a group predisposed, in aggregate, to admire and vote for Barack Obama—that the president and his administration are becoming a clear and present danger to the craft they practice. The Obama Justice Department's collection of vast phone records from the Associated Press, hot news in the past two days, has news people in a tizzy if not a fury. They are right to be angry, if a bit hypocritical given news organizations' widespread indifference to civil liberties breaches that don't affect them so directly. The AP records collection—by most accounts aimed at identifying a leaker inside the government—is an escalation of the administration's unprecedented war on leaks, a war that has made journalists a secondary but no less real target of surveillance. Once they get over being shocked, shocked at the administration's increasingly obvious antipathy toward what they do, American journalists will have to face up to the changed conditions in which they operate. They will have to take many more precautions as they do their work—especially when it comes to the absolutely essential work of finding government whistleblowers. The alternative is being almost entirely neutered, because no whistleblower in his or her right mind today should have much trust in journalists' ability to prevent discovery. The need to beef up journalistic security has been clear for some time. Last year, believable allegations surfaced that Chinese hackers, with likely ties to the Beijing regime, were hacking major news organizations' servers, prompting a flurry of countermeasures that may or may not be working. More recently, hackers apparently tricked their way into getting the AP's main Twitter passwords and then made bogus posts, including one that briefly whacked the financial markets. There were two key lessons for journalists here: a) be certain that they keep their accounts with third-party services under strict control and b) question whether they could afford the blowback from using third-party services that do not themselves employ up-to-date security practices. Now it's time now for U.S. media companies and individual bloggers alike to recognize that they live in an environment in which their own government—not to mention criminal or corporate hackers—may well be using all of the tools at its considerable disposal, legal or not, to spy on them. They will increasingly need to practice their craft here at home as if they were independent journalists or dissidents living under an authoritarian regime. Unless they and their sources are taking extraordinary precautions, journalists should take for granted that most mobile carriers will hand over pretty much anything the government wants, pretty much anytime it asks. This is true of most Internet service providers as well, in part because many the same companies that provide voice-based telecom services. Security experts have been urging journalists—and all of us who value privacy and safety—to think much harder about how we harden our communications against intrusion in general. We can't plan for every contingency, and we have to understand that if a powerful nation-state like this one is willing to break laws and/or work in secret it can get to things others cannot. But we can adapt to various threats. I asked the ACLU's Christopher Soghoian for some advice a year ago, for an article in Columbia Journalism Review, and he offered a several essential suggestions beyond the ones he'd previously made in a New York Times op-ed. For example, he advises against using phones for any conversations with endangered sources unless both sides are using untraceable prepaid devices. He urges folks to use virtual private networks, which encrypt information, but notes that governments (and others) can in many cases still know who's talking to whom. In general, he told me, talk in person if at all possible. Some journalists have taken worthwhile steps. In a noteworthy current example, The New Yorker just launched a "Strongbox" service, which will give sources an anonymous way—if they use it right—to send information to the magazine's journalists. The service leverages the Web-based Tor network, which anonymizes traffic. Every news organization that wants to do its job properly should put systems like this in place. Meanwhile, journalists can find a variety of useful security information from organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has focused mostly on threats abroad. CPJ's "Journalist Security Guide" is a great place to start.* Two days after the AP phone records handover was made public, the White House tried some damage control. It urged Congress to pass a so-called "reporters shield" law, even though no such proposal has never achieved critical mass in Washington. It might help—a little—if it becomes law. But the administration has pressed for a "national security exception" that, given its record, would be liberally applied. The reality is that journalists need to help themselves, in the United States and everywhere else. We need what they do, and their work is increasingly at risk.

Our world is changing so fast and in a blink everything is lost. Have you read 1984? Well, with great speed, we are arriving. Danger! Obama’s War on Journalists His administration’s leak investigations are outrageous and unprecedented. By Emily Bazelon|Posted Tuesday, May 14, 2013, at 6:32 PM Attorney General Eric Holder has overseen more leak investigations under Obama than were pursued under Bush Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images Attorney General Eric Holder has said that he doesn’t want the Obama administration’s leak prosecutions “to be his legacy.” But he has also trumpeted the cases—six and counting—in response to criticism from Senate Republicans. “We have tried more leak cases—brought more leak cases during the course of this administration than any other administration,” Holder said before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. This shouldn’t be a source of pride, even the fake point-scoring kind. In light of the Justice Department’s outrageously broad grab of the phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press, the administration’s unprecedented criminalizing of leaks has become embarrassing. This is not what Obama’s supporters thought they were getting. Obama the candidate strongly supported civil liberties and protections for whistle-blowers. Obama the president risks making government intrusion into the investigative work of the press a galling part of his legacy. Here’s the official excuse, from the Justice Department’s letter to AP today and from the daily White House press briefing: “The president feels strongly that we need the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism,” press secretary Jay Carney said. “He is also mindful of the need for secret and classified information to remain secret and classified in order to protect our national security interests.” That sounds like a perfectly reasonable balancing, but in practice, it’s not. Between 1917 and 1985, there was one successful federal leak prosecution. The Obama White House, by contrast, has pursued leaks “with a surprising relentlessness,” as Jane Mayer wrote in her masterful New Yorker piece about the prosecution of Thomas Drake. Of Holder and Obama’s six unlucky targets, Drake is the guy who best fits the whistle-blower profile: He gave information to a Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote “a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices” in the National Security Agency. After years of hounding, the case against Drake fell apart, and he wound up pleading guilty to one misdemeanor. No jail time. Advertisement The Drake prosecution started under President George W. Bush. So did the leak prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA officer charged with disclosing information about Iran to James Risen of the New York Times. But Obama’s Justice Department has also launched its own prosecutions, as the AP probe underscores. As Scott Shane and Charlie Savage pointed out last year in the New York Times, it was in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, that DOJ and the director of national intelligence created a taskforce that “streamlined procedures to follow up on leaks.” At the same time, the increasing prevalence of electronic records made investigations easier. The result, as Shane and Savage write, is that while the Justice Department used to be “where leak complaints from the intelligence agencies went to die,” now they are being kept alive. Nor is there a law or a Supreme Court reading of the Constitution to kill them. Timothy Lee lays it out nicely on Wonkblog so I don’t have to: You don’t have a right to protect information that you give to someone else. That’s what the Supreme Court thinks phones calls are—the act of dialing. This could apply to the content of email that lives in the cloud—Gmail! Journalists get the benefit of a rule the Justice Department has made for itself, supposedly to prevent interference with the First Amendment–protected work of reporters. The rule says that the attorney general has to approve the demand for records, and that DOJ lawyers have to take all the other reasonable steps they can before drawing up a subpoena, and then write it as narrowly as possible. But the AP probe, and other examples of surveillance of reporters, show that the rules only mean so much. In Tuesday’s letter to the AP, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said that in this case, DoJ “undertook a comprehensive investigation, including, among other investigative steps, conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents, before seeking the toll records at issue.” But that doesn’t really tell us whether this ordering up of phone records was a valid response to an egregious leak that breached national security, or another Drake affair. The AP thinks the Justice Department wants to know how it reported a story in May 2012 about the CIA’s foiling of a plot by al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate to plant a bomb on a plane. Here’s the story. The AP said at the time that it actually held off publishing for a week, in response to White House and CIA requests, “because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way.” The government knows things I don’t, of course, but reading the story now, it’s hard to see a threat to national security in the content—it’s just not all that detailed. Whether a leak threatens national security is clearly not the standard Holder and his department are using. And the problem is that the standard is up to them. The 1917 Espionage Act, the basis for most of these cases, was written to go after people who compromised military operations. Back in 1973, the major law review article on that statute concluded that Congress never intended to go after journalists with it, or even their sources. Since then, legal scholars have proposed various ways of narrowing the Espionage Act—University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone wants to limit the law’s reach to cases in which there’s proof that a reporter knows publication will wreck national security without contributing to the public debate. But Congress has done nothing of the sort. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Republicans who are indignant over the AP investigation got serious about reform? Somehow, I doubt it. Instead, with a Democratic White House leading the charge, it’s hard to see who will stop this train. NEXT ITEM IN WEIGEL× Read the Audit of the IRS's Political Scandal Sign up for MySlate to follow all Weigel stories. 922 436