The recent scandal exposing the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records from the Associated Press is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. For years we have suspected that the government is colluding with phone companies to collect, store and analyze records of telephone calls on American citizens, without individual warrants or probable cause.

According to whistleblowers who appear in Seizing Power, this surveillance goes far beyond just collecting and analyzing phone records, and includes the contents of emails and phone conversations themselves. Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have warned that the Obama administration is carrying out widespread surveillance of Americans under a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act that the Administration refuses to disclose.

We now have actual evidence that millions of call records are being collected by the National Security Agency. A top secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court became public yesterday, and was published in The Guardian. It demands that Verizon provide call records of ALL of its American business customers and that the very existence of the court order be kept secret. As Juan Cole observed, this means that it is illegal for us to even look at it. Although the demand is directed at Verizon, we can assume that the same demand is being made to all other phone companies and Internet service providers, and that this has been going on for years.

We can now expect a massive investigation by the FBI and the Justice Department to hunt down and punish the source of this leak, which will no doubt include an effort to seize the phone records of The Guardian, and Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who exposed it, in an effort to intimidate other potential whistleblowers from communicating with them.

It was recently discovered that the Justice Department secretly seized hundreds of telephone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press in an effort to hunt down the source of a leak that exposed a CIA operation. This is a dramatic escalation in the government’s efforts to conceal its activities and to intimidate and punish anyone in the government who dares to expose criminal activity and wrongdoing. It is another front in the continuing campaign by Obama’s Justice Department to harass and persecute whistleblowers, several of whom appear in Seizing Power. Not only does this kind of privacy intrusion intimidate whistleblowing, it creates a chilling effect on news gathering and freedom of the press. As investigative reporter Charles Lewis points out in Seizing Power, “It’s hard enough to do journalism, but if you’re being monitored while you’re doing the journalism, you have no chance at all. An anonymous source is a thing of the past. Is there any better way to chill the media itself? I don’t think so.”

Justice Dept Seizes AP Phone Records

Threats to Free Press are Clear