Beyond Rosen and the AP: Who Else Has the DoJ Put Under Surveillance?

In light of the revelations about the Department of Justice's broad search of Associated Press phone records and Sunday's Washington Post piece revealing new details about DoJ surveillance of Fox News's James Rosen during its 2010 investigation into a State Department official suspected of leaking the reporter classified information about North Korea, there's an old Washington Post piece from 2010 that's worth turning back to.

In an August 2010 report on the indictment of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim on charges of "disclosing national defense information in June 2009 to a national news organization, believed to be Fox News," several other reporters were mentioned in relation to the DoJ leak investigations, in addition to Rosen.

"Since December, prosecutors have indicted Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency official, with improperly handling classified information with a Baltimore Sun reporter" and "secured a guilty plea from Shamai Kedem Leibowitz, a former FBI contract linguist, for leaking documents to a blogger."

The Drake indictment describes the Sun reporter as reporter A and talks about her email account and computer:

    "Reporter A," a person known to the Grand Jury, was employed by a national newspaper and wrote newspaper articles about the NSA and its intelligence activities, including SIGfNT programs. The United States had never authorized Reporter A to receive classified information, and Reporter A did not have a United States government security clearance. Moreover, at no time did the United States ever authorize Reporter A to possess classified documents or information on a personal computer or in a personal e-mail account.

Reporter A was subsequently identified as Siobhan Gorman, now with the Wall Street Journal. Most of the Drake case charges came to nothing in the end and Drake in 2011 "accepted a plea deal from the government...that drops the charges in his indictment, absolves him of mishandling classified information and calls for no prison time."

Leibowitz pled guilty in 2009 to providing classified material to "the host of a public blog available to anyone with access to the Internet," according to the DoJ. The blogger in his case was later identified as Richard Silverstein, who wrote the liberal Tikun Olam blog.

In addition to these two and Rosen -- who was not named by the government but by the Post in both its 2010 and 2013 stories -- there was a fourth outlet named in that 2010 roundup: "Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning" was "suspected of giving a classified video of a U.S. military helicopter firing at civilians in Baghdad to the WikiLeaks.org site," as well as other information.

If you've been following the WikiLeaks/Julian Assange saga, you know how that ended up.

Manning's trial is scheduled to begin in June.

Original Article
Source: theatlantic.com
Author: Garance Franke-Ruta