The Media Chicken Or The CIA Egg?

Quick important update: I should have pointed this out before when I noticed it. The ABC blog breaking the original item below, also talked to Russ Tice recently, as referenced in an earlier ABC post.

NSA whistleblower Russ Tice says he will tell Congress Wednesday of "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" involving the agency's former director, Gen. Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee to run the CIA.

I posted info about Russ Tice here. He wouldn't qualifiy as an offical these days, so he likely isn't the source. But the news below is precisely the kind of info he tends to put out there. Is he crazy? Who knows.

OTB posts on the news from ABC that they've been told the government is monitoring the phone calls of certain journalists. Allow me to play devil's advocate.

It's possible there is a media-centric spin to the way this is coming out. Obviously some one or more individuals with a security clearance have been leaking classified information. There's no reason to expect that wouldn't be investigated, the CIA as much as said so.

Now, if the phone records, and even conversations of said individual were legitimately being investigated, it's quite possible that journalists could be caught up in that net if the target(s) of the investigation do in fact leak. That could have brought about the seemingly informal mention of it. It would also be an entirely different matter than how the initial report makes it appear.

And if you really want to get all CIA sneaky ... maybe it's all a ruse to shake some things up and see who in government service starts to get a lot of worried calls. Funny how the media seems to love playing spy versus spy ... at least until they have to play against the real thing. ha

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources. “It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls. Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Also see a discussion of it here.

Comments

[Jason Coleman]

Hey Dan, just a few quick comments and questions. Firstly, why do you think it's not being reported that these records have been handed over to the government for decades now. They used to hand them over on magnetic tape to the FCC and now it's done electronically via real-time over the internet. Additionally, when the FCC gets this information, it automatically becomes accessible to the NSA as well as other agencies like the DEA.

The DEA has been mining this data since the days of the Reagan admin (and probably before).

So now the real question, don't people realize that the phone lines and the cellular airwaves are public right of way's? Of course monitoring the traffic in a public right of way isn't illegal, it's necessary for all sorts of things, from catching speeders along a particular stretch of road to nabbing bookies and their clients operating out of the back of a butcher shop, to now catching terrorists that would do us harm.

Why isn't the blogosphere and the media in general recognizing that there is not an expectation of privacy within the public right of way? Sure if they begin collecting whole conversations and monitoring those (wait a sec, they already do that with ECHELON. . . nevermind, I've answered my own questions).

It's just a 'hate Bush' thing. I get it now.

--Jason

[Concerned]

I guess the 'leakers' should be using those disposable phones I've read so much about. The one's used by run of the mill criminals, drug dealers, and stalkers, because they're difficult to trace and track.