It's News, Not Espionage

[Draggingtree]

Real Clear Politics: It's News, Not Espionage

By Eugene Robinson May 21, 2013

 

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists' phone records, perusing their emails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn't chilling, it's just plain cold.

 

It also may well be unconstitutional. In my reading, the First Amendment prohibition against "abridging the freedom ... of the press" should rule out secretly obtaining two months' worth of the personal and professional phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors, including calls to and from the main AP phone number at the House press gallery in the Capitol. Yet this is what the Justice Department did.

 

In other words, since there is no law that makes publishing this classified information illegal, the Justice

Department claims that obtaining the information was a violation of the Espionage Act.

(The wagons are circling)