Star 69, or, "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick."
Doorbell rings it's the FBI
We learned spy vs spy
You my friend, are guilty as can be, be
I know you called, I know you called .... *
So, the NSA is not only gathering phone records on the calls of most Americans, a federal source is telling ABC News that the government is tracking phone calls by it, The New York Times and the Washington Post to find out who these news organizations' sources sources are.
What follows is pure speculation. But I'll bet you a beer that if they're using phone records to track down news media sources, they're looking into the phone calls of real or suspected political enemies as well. When government goes bad, it tends not to go just a little bad.
UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long:
The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters' phone records in leak investigations."It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration," said a senior federal official.
Translation: The attorney general is telling us we don't need no steenkin' warrants, notwithstanding the fact that FISA still says we certainly do.
The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being "tracked."
"Think of it more as backtracking," said a senior federal official.
Oh. Well, I feel so much better.
Memo to the FBI: Instead of wasting all this time and effort "tak[ing] logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information," why don't you take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized classification of material documenting crimes on the part of the government? Because Patriot Act or no Patriot Act, it remains a crime to use the classification process to conceal crimes by government officials.
I'm just sayin'.
*Thanks to my friend the DivaGeek for reminding me of the REM lyrics.
