This is one of the most disturbing things I've seen in a long time...
Right up there with what the Nixon Plumbers did to Daniel Ellsworth, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
This story is so important, I can't bear to excerpt it. Spread it all over the place. That's more important, especially if it starts disappearing.
Link: Secret gov't source tells ABC News: 'Get new cellphones' | The Swamp - Chicago Tribune - Blogs.
Originally posted: May 15, 2006
Secret gov't source tells ABC News: 'Get new cellphones'
Posted by Frank James at 12:10 pm CDT
ABC News has a very disturbing report today, at least for reporters and anyone else who believe that whistleblowers serve an important role in safeguarding American democracy.
On its blog, The Blotter, ABC News reports that a senior government source has told its reporters that the reporters’ phone calls with sources are being tracked by the U.S. government “to root out confidential sources.”
I hasten to say I don't have independent confirmation of the facts underlying the ABC News report. But I thought it was something readers of The Swamp would find interesting. The item follows.
Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
May 15, 2006 10:33 AMBrian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
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.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
Being a confidential source who disagrees with a presidential administration then decides to oppose it by becoming a whistleblower can take courage when discovery means loss of a job and possible legal consequences.
It’s just that kind of courage that this revelation is likely to chill. That could be the administration’s intent here, to make would-be confidential sources think twice before talking with reporters.
It’s no small irony that the only reason we now know about this is because a ABC News’ confidential source told them about it.
The Blotter posting raises the question of whether ABC News’ phone calls were swept up as part of the vast National Security Agency database consisting of the phone-call records of millions of Americans which USA Today reported on last week.
It’s impossible for anyone outside of a few inside the government to say. But the fact that ABC News journalists are even seriously wondering about whether the warning is connected to the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities indicates just how anxious many people in Washington have become.
Call me paranoid, but you know what I'd be doing if I were running a news or an umbrella blogging operation? I'd send buyers out to get those advance pay-per-use cell phones, like drug dealers use, from what I hear. Buy 5-10 of them at a site here, a site there. Keep 'em in the managing editor's office, in a big basket. Reporters can just rotate in and out with them, swap out the SIM chips with new ones once they run out of pre-paid calls.
See, the reporter would keep her "official" cell phone, the one with the address book, family contacts, etc. The second phone would be the throwaway. You can look up or keep the numbers somehow, elsewhere. Reporters probably do that for confidential sources now anyway, to keep from the risk of losing a regular phone.
So you'd use the two phones the way I used to use my two camera bodies when I shot football. (I'd dropped one camera on its head and busted the internal light meter) I had one on long lens and one on shorter lens, so I'd spot meter with one camera, and use it to set the broken meter on the other camera. Hey, a broken meter is no reason to throw out a perfectly good Nikon manual camera, from back in the day when cameras were made of something other than plastic.
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