** FILE ** Associated Press
-
Friday, October 25, 2013
Maryland state police
and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal
investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning
former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had
exposed problems in the
Homeland Security Department's Federal Air Marshal Service.
Reporter
Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for
Homeland's Coast Guard
service, took her private notes and government documents that she had
obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of
her family home on Aug. 6.
The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times about problems inside the
Homeland Security Department, were seized under a warrant to search for unregistered firearms and a “potato gun” suspected of belonging to her husband,
Paul Flanagan, a Coast Guard employee.
Mr. Flanagan has not been charged with any wrongdoing since the raid.
The warrant, obtained by the Times, offered no specific permission to seize reporting notes or files.
The
Washington Times said Friday it is preparing legal action to fight
what it called an unwarranted intrusion on the First Amendment.
“While
we appreciate law enforcement’s right to investigate legitimate
concerns, there is no reason for agents to use an unrelated gun case to
seize the First Amendment protected materials of a reporter,” Times
Editor
John Solomon
said. “This violates the very premise of a free press, and it raises
additional concerns when one of the seizing agencies was a frequent
target of the reporter’s work.
“Homeland’s conduct in seizing
privileged reporters notes and Freedom of Information Act documents
raises serious Fourth Amendment issues, and our lawyers are preparing
an appropriate legal response,” he said.
Maryland State Police
declined comment, except to say that “evidence and information
developed during this investigation is currently under review by both
the
Anne Arundel County State's Attorney's Office and the
United State's Attorney's Office,” and that a determination has yet to be made on any charges.The
U.S. Coast Guard confirmed it seized and reviewed
Ms. Hudson’s documents but insisted it did nothing wrong.
Read More Here
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Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America
U.S.
President Barack Obama came into office pledging open government, but
he has fallen short of his promise. Journalists and transparency
advocates say the White House curbs routine disclosure of information
and deploys its own media to evade scrutiny by the press. Aggressive
prosecution of leakers of classified information and broad electronic
surveillance programs deter government sources from speaking to
journalists.
A CPJ special report by Leonard Downie Jr. with reporting by Sara Rafsky
Barack Obama leaves a press conference in the East Room of the White House August 9. (AFP/Saul Loeb)
Published October 10, 2013
WASHINGTON, D.C.
In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are
increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing
with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are
subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of
their telephone and e-mail records. An “Insider Threat Program” being
implemented in every government department requires all federal
employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by
monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.
Six government
employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been
subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917
Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the
press—compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous
U.S. administrations. Still more criminal investigations into leaks are
under way. Reporters’ phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed
and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a
Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those
subpoenas of being “an aider, abettor and/or conspirator” of an indicted
leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job
as a journalist. In another leak case, a
New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail.
Compounding
the concerns of journalists and the government officials they contact,
news stories based on classified documents obtained from Snowden have
revealed extensive surveillance of Americans’ telephone and e-mail
traffic by the National Security Agency. Numerous Washington-based
journalists told me that officials are reluctant to discuss even
unclassified information with them because they fear that leak
investigations and government surveillance make it more difficult for
reporters to protect them as sources. “I worry now about calling
somebody because the contact can be found out through a check of phone
records or e-mails,” said veteran national security journalist R.
Jeffrey Smith of the Center for Public Integrity, an influential
nonprofit government accountability news organization in Washington. “It
leaves a digital trail that makes it easier for the government to
monitor those contacts,” he said.
“I think we have a real problem,” said
New York Times national
security reporter Scott Shane. “Most people are deterred by those leaks
prosecutions. They’re scared to death. There’s a gray zone between
classified and unclassified information, and most sources were in that
gray zone. Sources are now afraid to enter that gray zone. It’s having a
deterrent effect. If we consider aggressive press coverage of
government activities being at the core of American democracy, this tips
the balance heavily in favor of the government.”
At the same
time, the journalists told me, designated administration spokesmen are
often unresponsive or hostile to press inquiries, even when reporters
have been sent to them by officials who won’t talk on their own. Despite
President Barack Obama’s repeated promise that his administration would
be the most open and transparent in American history, reporters and
government transparency advocates said they are disappointed by its
performance in improving access to the information they need.
“This
is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,”
said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of
The New York Times.
Obama
and host Jay Leno tape 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno' at NBC Studios
on August 6 in Burbank, California. (AFP/Mandel Ngan)
The
Obama administration has notably used social media, videos, and its own
sophisticated websites to provide the public with
administration-generated information about its activities, along with
considerable government data useful for consumers and businesses.
However, with some exceptions, such as putting the White House visitors’
logs on the whitehouse.gov
website
and selected declassified documents on the new U.S. Intelligence
Community website, it discloses too little of the information most
needed by the press and public to hold the administration accountable
for its policies and actions. “Government should be transparent,” Obama
stated
on the White House website, as he has repeatedly in presidential
directives. “Transparency promotes accountability and provides
information for citizens about what their government is doing.”
Read More Here
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DHS raids Human Events alumnus, seizes list of whistleblowers
HUMAN
EVENTS alumnus Audrey Hudson was the target of a Department of Homeland
Security raid in August that was ostensibly related to firearms, but in
a new interview with the
Daily Caller, she revealed that DHS and the Maryland State Police also just
happened to confiscate her files and notes… which included information about whistleblowers inside Homeland Security.
Hudson says the files were taken without her knowledge, and without a subpoena. The
Daily Caller confirmed that the search warrant pertained to firearms and ammunition. Even
that part of the story seems rather flimsy, but then we get to all those juicy files that got hoovered up during the raid:
At
about 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, Hudson said officers dressed in full body
armor presented a search warrant to enter the home she shares on the bay
with her husband. She estimates that at least seven officers took part
in the raid.
After the search began, Hudson said she was asked by
an investigator with the Coast Guard Investigative Service if she was
the same Audrey Hudson who had written a series of critical stories
about air marshals for The Washington Times over the last decade. The
Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security.
Hudson said that investigator, Miguel Bosch, identified himself as a former air marshal official.
But
it wasn’t until a month later, on Sept. 10, that Hudson was informed by
Bosch that five files including her handwritten and typed notes from
interviews with numerous confidential sources and other documents had
been taken during the raid.
“In particular, the files included
notes that were used to expose how the Federal Air Marshal Service had
lied to Congress about the number of airline flights there were actually
protecting against another terrorist attack,” Hudson wrote in a summary
about the raid provided to TheDC.
Read More Here
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