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Why DOJ Didn't Need a "Super Search Warrant" To Snoop On Fox News' E-mail
awaissoft writes "If attorney general Eric Holder wanted to perform even a momentary Internet wiretap on Fox News' e-mail accounts, he would have had to persuade a judge to approve what lawyers call a 'super search warrant.' A super search warrant's requirements are exacting: Intercepted communications must be secured and placed under seal. Real-time interception must be done only as a last resort. Only certain crimes qualify for this technique, the target must be notified, and additional restrictions apply to state and local police conducting real-time intercepts. But because of the way federal law was written nearly half a century ago, Holder was able to obtain a normal search warrant — lacking those extensive privacy protections — that allowed federal agents to secretly obtain up to six years of email correspondence between Fox News correspondent James Rosen and his alleged sources."
And although Fox is playing the indignant victim all over the news right now, they've know about this for a long time.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Investigative journalism apparently. You know, the stuff that the major networks gave up on years ago.
I know they are stupid and shouldn't be called a news show, but what did they do that requires wiretapping?
Rosen reported that,
"U.S. intelligence officials have warned President Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution this week... with another nuclear test,"
And now the "Justice" Department is telling us that they consider him an accomplice to espionage.
Essentially, the reporter in question wrote an article just to say that we had a high-level asset inside the North Korean government. There was no new factual information in the article otherwise - just the need to out a spy in an article about North Korea responding to sanctions. Similar to the AP case, where the reporter felt the need to out the fact that the British had an undercover operative inside Al Qaida who delivered them a sample bomb for analysis.
> "And now the "Justice" Department is telling us that they consider him an accomplice to espionage."
And...
"The Obama Administration fought to keep a search warrant for James Rosen’s private e-mail account secret, arguing to a federal judge that the government might need to monitor the account for a lengthy period of time"
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/how-justice-fought-to-keep-rosens-warrant-secret.html
Yeah, that's the reason Obama fought to keep this hidden. Because Rosen might be some kind of super-spy.
Nigga please.
An infringement on the freedom of the press, or the confidentiality of sources, is a threat to democracy regardless of whether it targets an actual news agency or a mockery thereof.
It's just hundreds of innocent Mexicans murdered by guns the administration supplied to drug cartels. How is that a scandal?
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney made his dog ride on top of the family car once. Sorry widows and orphans of murdered Mexicans, you lose.
The studies you cite, done by a democrat professor from a less-than-stellar university over-sampled Fox news viewers and then asked them a bunch of "current events" questions which ALL Americans generally do poorly at.
Want the TRUTH? try this page which is not a Fox-related site.
Try getting some news from a place not tied to the Democrats or to Progressives (i.e. stop soaking your head in the MSNBC/HuffPo/Kos KoolAid). Some lefty academics have done studies specifically designed to trash non-lefties and then pushed them through the progressive-run media (all of whom hyped those studies and in a circular fashion passed them around) and because most of their target audience never seems to come up to the surface for air, this scheme works fairly well.... it just does not convince anybody whose not already in the tank.
Progressivism is toxic and Dangerous and always leads to bad things... Progressives count on the public being dumb enough to confuse "Progressivism" with "progress"... the two are only related if you are a hard-core evolutionist who wants to give mother nature a bit of a hand... The last time Progressivism rose in America (Early 1900's) it lead to extreme evil and it spread some nasty ideas (like genetic purity/superiority/cleanliness, supermen, euthenasia, the individual as only a cog in the great machine of society, assigning a dollar value to a human being, etc) around the world... so much so that the left abandoned the "progressive" title they'd previously been proud of and they hid behind the moniker: "liberal". Now, having soiled the term "liberal" they are hoping that everybody forgot about the bad side of progressivism and, like cattle, they are all following Hillary Clinton's call to go back to that term. There's a very good reason why nearly all the Progressive webites and think tanks have been partly funded by the world's richest and most famous NAZI collaborator.... young people need to WAKE UP and study some of that history stuff your progressive/unionized teachers did not teach you... you are being setup for a VERY DARK future just as a previous generation of young people were similarly setup.... only now the world has far better technology to oppress and kill...
Bush had PLENTY of reasons to do this (like when the New York Times leaked that the Bush admin was tracing cell phones to try to get BinLaden...and then Bin Laden stopped using cell phones.... and then the NYT wrote repeatedly about Bush's inability to get BinLaden...) and Yet the supremely evil (in the eyes of left-wingers) George W Bush did not do this to the New York Times
There, You have been PROVEN wrong... and it was EASY.
The really foul and toxic thing here is that the Reporter has been listed in court documents signed by Eric Holder (Obama's Atty Gen) as a co-conspiritor.... in other words (for those of you who depend on comedy shows for your news) in the eyes of Obama, doing the most basic job of journalism (asking questions of government employees) is a criminal act. Even Nixon knew that it was the job of reporters to ask questions and the job of government people to know which ones not to answer (and to not answer THOSE questions). In a "leak" it has always been the leaker who was violating the law (the guy who has the info is the one who knows whether it is classified and who has taken an oath to keep it secret). Sometimes, when a leak was a very big national security measure, the govt went to the receiver of the leak and asked him not to publish (and Nixon went to court to try to keep the leak from being published...a fight he lost when the courts refused to support "prior restraint" on the free speech of journalists...) It's a big leap, however, for Obama to go to court and say it's a crime for journalists to ask questions of his employees...
Just remember this, you progressives:
Every single thing Obama gets away with doing to Fox sets a precedent.... some future Republican president will be justified in doing it to all the non-Fox news outlets... Everybody at the NYT is a criminal just for asking questions.... (oh, and using the IRS to go after conservative groups? ha, ha, ha.... audits in the future of "enemies" at HuffPo, Kos, MoveOn, MSNBC, etc are now completely justified... move along... nothing to see here....) By going so far in the tank for Obama and not attacking this behavior, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, NYT, WaPo, etc have done themselves and their viewer/readers a huge long-term disservice
Can you point to us where the other networks were investigating things...unless fox was investigating it first? You know, sometimes a month or more beforehand. Besides, it wasn't just MSNBC in pander mode, but NBC, CBS, CNN, and NPR. So, really now we've got a 5:1 ratio. Then again, Fox was hardly silent during the days of W, and broke several stories that the other part of news media then caught onto. And really the media hasn't only done this with the current administration, but other important news stories...like the Gosnell trial. And the only reason why they refused to do any news on that is because they were carrying even more water.
Even though I'm up in Canada, Fox was the only one that carried pundits on both sides of the issue on that one. The other 5 did nothing on it, for nearly a month. In fact the reserved press section in the courtroom was uniformly empty of them, AP, Reuters, AFP among others and only Fox and bloggers were the ones covering it.
Om, nomnomnom...