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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."
Investigative journalism apparently. You know, the stuff that the major networks gave up on years ago.
Did you even bother to read the story at the link you provided?
The story there tells us that FoxNews knew of a telephone records search, but not of an email search.
"CNN and other media outlets have previously reported a separate Justice Department query into Rosen's e-mails. With the approval of Attorney General Eric Holder, Justice officials obtained a warrant from a federal judge to access Rosen's e-mails.
While Fox News is now acknowledging that the Justice Department notified its parent company about the phone records search, that notice apparently did not include anything about the separate search of Rosen's e-mail."
Leftist here. It's not OK because its Fox and it's not OK because Obama did it. And FYI I'm sure the government would have also engaged in unconstitutional wire tapping were Romney (or Paul, or [Insert your favorite controlled opposition candidate here]).
Your problem might be that you have mistaken Democrats for actual leftists.
Don't let the Red/Blue Faux News debate cloud this issue. It doesn't matter who did it or to whom it is not okay and this policy should be banned.
I know they are stupid and shouldn't be called a news show, but what did they do that requires wiretapping?
Journalism.
No, seriously: James Rosen asked someone at the State Department questions about North Korea.
Because that apparently could involve classified information (not that it necessarily did), Obama's Department of Justice pulled six years of Rosen's email.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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.
Not shocking this is flagged informative by the left leaning slashdot. Gotta circle the troops around the commander and chief. God forbid he is worse than GWB, which is a feat in itself no one could have imagined.
An administration spying on journalists and using the IRS as a political tool is chilling as fuck and every single American ought to be scared as shit of it. Oh wait, you voted for him? Makes it ok I guess!
It's not what they did; it's what the person talking to them was allegedly doing. The Executive branch was investigating a leak from one of its own, and Fox News was on the receiving end of the information, apparently, so by wiretapping Fox News' communications, they were hoping to find the source of the leak.
This is exactly the kind of activity that is supposed to be prohibited by the 1st amendment; attempting to force the press (covertly or not) to reveal the identity of their sources.
Doesn't matter who's fault it is...
who started privacy abuses,
what party is/was in power.
There is something going terribly wrong here.
We, as Americans,
have obviously slid quite a little way down the slippery slope,
toward something quite different than the bastion of freedom we like to think of ourselves as...
We should be doing something more about it than pointing fingers and playing politics.
Yes but Gouvernments these days asks themselves the important question of "What Would Nixon Do?".
Fast & Furious is a major scandal. It's perfectly reasonable for Fox to treat it as such.
Under the law they used for the warrant, they didn't have to notify until 90 days after the termination of the intercept.
But since the intercept was continuous, and for all we know, still on-going, they never notified about Rosen's mail.
The whole article is a mess of obfuscation until you read to the bottom of the the story where it FINALLY gets to the point:
The gradual supplanting of the POP protocol, where messages typically were not left on mail servers and available for law enforcement, by the newer server-based IMAP protocol also encouraged this shift.
Any mail you keep on a service for more than 6 months is considered abandoned, and fair game. This means ANY IMAP account outside of your premises is wide open to seizure.
Which means every google/microsoft/yahoo mail account is fair game under the obsolete 68 law unless you take careful pains to only and always use POP, and never leave a copy on the server.
The law is clearly being deliberately misused, and the mail is not abandoned, as long as the account is being used.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If you are an honest individual, the easiest way to show you that you are wrong is to have you look at youtube for the times where they have taken news from elsewhere and spliced it together to try to make something which never existed... for example, fox took a segment from the daily show during the 2008 election and did just that.
I am being polite here, the alternative to the above would just be a troll fest.
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.
Congress should pass an adjusted law and move on rather than making it a witch hunt. Trying to milk it as a "dirty conspiracy" will just pull BOTH parties (deeper) into the mud.
Computerized gerrymandering is part of the problem: politicians redraw their own districts to be slanted politically so that all they have to do is kiss up to extremists to get re-elected rather than do real work.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Especially as the PFC actually raised his right hand and swore to be a good and obedient soldier. His was an act of treason whereas reporters are generally depended upon to be all about the story they are after. This is Fox News though. A lot of the left hates them enough to not mind if the administration they worship pisses all over the First Amendment. I noticed most of the leftist media though wasn't so happy about it however. They, unlike the liberals here, are smart enough to realize that one day there might be another Republican administration (I doubt it but I guess it could happen) and they don't like the precedent this sets. To me this is just another sign that using e-mail is not a good idea. If I was in the news business I'd start raising pigeons.
Does that "current events" selection include all of Obama's scandals and coverups? Or is it limited to who won American Idol and how big Kim Kararshian's ass is?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Except Nixon was a saint compared to Obama.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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...
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...
The simple solution is to fold email into current law so as to enjoy the same protections as snail mail.
LOL, no, if you voted for Romney the government would have engaged in unconstitutional wiretapping anyway. Everyone wants to expand government powers when they're in charge then rein them back when they aren't.
My problem with Fox News and their supporters is their embarrassing inconsistencies on this issue. Roger Ailes said in 1988 that leakers should be tortured and executed, and Fox News personalities have consistently declared war against Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Wikileaks because they weren't real news organizations. It's the leftists who defended Bradley Manning and also Fox News. Just read everyone who supports Fox News. Even the New York Times got Fox News' back: "With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible ''co-conspirator'' in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news." So not only are you wrong about the right, you're also wrong about the left. I guess you must be a GOP.
And about the IRS scandal. Remember when four Republican congressmen asked (and received) a three year IRS probe into the NAACP for saying bad things about President Bush? LOL.
Seriously, the GOP and its supporters should adopt a worldview that's at least internally consistent. The leftists do a better job of it than the right. The GOP argues that we should preserve the Constitution then argues that we should strip American citizens of their Constitutional rights because they were accused of being a bomber. PLEASE THINK BEFORE YOU SPEAK!
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
You have no idea what you are talking about.
It is NOT illegal to receive classified information and publish it if it is just dumped in your lap, like the Pentagon Papers.
It is if you asked for it and conspired obtain the information, which is what they are trying to proveby naming him an coconspiritor.
Add to that the fact tht Holder testified he knew nothing about it and did not condone it.... And yet it turns out he signed the warrant.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
But that would be a Sudden Outbreak of Common Sense, and those have been illegal for neigh on 30 years now.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.