Seizure of journalists’ phonerecords causes uproar in US

WASHINGTON: US Attorney General Eric Holder was likely to face a storm of questions today over the Justice Department’s controversial decision to seize telephone records of The Associated Press, a move denounced by critics as a gross intrusion into freedom of the press.
The episode has created an uproar in Washington and led to questions over how the Obama administration is balancing the need for national security with privacy rights. Holder, a frequent target of conservatives, was scheduled to appear at 1 p.m. (1700 GMT) with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to discuss Medicare fraud but he was likely to face questions from reporters about his decision on the AP records.
In a decision made public on Friday, Holder ordered federal agents to secretly seize telephone records of AP offices and reporters for a two-month period last year.
The AP on Monday described the seizures as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into news-gathering operations.
AP Chief Executive Gary Pruitt, in a letter posted on the agency’s website, said the AP was informed last Friday that the Justice Department gathered records for more than 20 phone lines assigned to the news agency and its reporters. “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Pruitt said in the letter addressed to Holder.
An AP story on the records seizure said the government would not say why it sought them.
But it noted that US officials have previously said the US Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia was conducting a criminal investigation into information contained in a May 7, 2012, AP story about a CIA operation in Yemen that stopped an Al-Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb on an airplane headed for the United States.
Five reporters and an editor involved in that story were among those whose phone records were obtained by the government, the AP said.
The disclosure threatened to set off a confrontation between free press advocates and the Obama administration, which has aggressively pursued national security leaks. “It’s alarming given the scale of it,” said David Schulz, an attorney with Levine Sullivan Koch & Schulz who is representing the AP. “This is a massive intrusion into the news gathering operation of one of the largest news organizations in the US People should be concerned.” The US Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia, which notified the AP of the seizure, issued a statement on Monday saying it was “careful and deliberative” when dealing with issues around freedom of the press.
“We take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations,” the office said.