There’s something fishy about this one. The FBI director telephoned the editors of the Washington Post and N.Y. Times to apologize for the Bureau’s obtaining the phone records of four of their Indonesia-based reporters in 2004:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.
…The F.B.I. obtained the records of two reporters for The Times in Indonesia, Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez, as well as two reporters there for The Post, Ellen Nakashima and Natasha Tampubolon, officials said.
“The F.B.I. is committed to protecting the news media consistent with the First Amendment and Department of Justice policies, and we very much regret that this situation occurred,” Valerie Caproni, general counsel for the bureau, wrote in a letter to Mr. Keller faxed Friday.
Ms. Caproni said the telephone records, which list the numbers that were called but do not show the calls’ content, had been purged from the F.B.I.’s databases. She also said the records were not used as part of any investigation.
That seems preposterous. In 2004, the U.S. was likely trying to identify Indonesia militants who might have supported various terrorist bombings there since 2001. Why would the FBI have gotten the records unless it had something to do with such investigations? To claim that the records were not obtained in some way related to this beggars belief.
This episode also reflects directly on the FISA-NSA-telecom controversy:
…The inspector general last year found that the F.B.I. had violated its own policies in tens of thousands of cases by obtaining phone records in terrorism investigations through what are known as national security letters, without first getting needed approval or meeting other standards. In some cases, the F.B.I. used a whole new class of demands — emergency or “exigent” letters — that are not authorized by law. The emergency records were used in the Indonesian episode
If we ever needed a reason that telecom immunity made no sense this is it. How will we ever get a phone company to stop and question the legitimacy of such “legally unauthorized” demands if they face no prospect of being accountable for their actions? This seems an almost certain guarantee to promote lawlessness. Only in this crazy day and age can we say that Congress has passed a law which actually promotes lawlessness.
