It was bad enough when the Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder engaged in spying on journalist James Rosen (and even spied on his parents’ phone records). And the same cast of characters secretly spied on Associated Press reporters — also in the name of tracking down government leakers.
Amid those discoveries were NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations about massive government spying on the citizenry, which Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had denied under oath. As the dominos began to fall, Holder expressed some regret, particularly as it applied to the intrusion upon journalists, who until the Obama administration had been considered largely off limits for the government’s intel dragnet.
Then there’s my case.
During the same period, intelligence sources alerted me that the government was spying on my electronic devices while I was an investigative reporter at CBS News. I was often working with whistleblowers inside the administration: honest people willing to expose bad things going on inside the federal government.
The nature of the government’s surveillance on me and my family is forensically proven and not subject to legitimate question. Yet, unlike with the discoveries about James Rosen and AP, the government has yet to issue its mea culpa. And there’s a reason.
As bad as they were, the other known instances of journalists being spied upon happened under cover of court orders, albeit ones issued in secrecy. But the government spying on me was not done under the authority of a court warrant. That’s why my case is even more dangerous than the others. It implies that the scope of government improperly turning its intel tools on its own citizens, including journalists and political enemies, could be far more extensive than anyone realizes.
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Sharyl, obviously they know by admitting it to the public, which would be only on Fox News and a few Internet Sites. They would be opening The U.S. Government up to your forthcoming Muti-Billion Dollar Lawsuit. It’s sad what happened during The Obama Years, but even long before that. We The People have been brainwashed into thinking OUR government is above corruption and nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is more like The U.S. Government is the MOST corrupt government in the world. I don’t KNOW if you are going to file a Muti-Billion Dollar Lawsuit against this den of criminals, but I pray you do. As long as they, IRS, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. get away with what they’re still doing. It will continue. Good luck! You have my full support in your quest fro Justice. Go Trump and Go America!
Surveillance is not a zero-sum game. Although the US government hacked its citizens, SIGINT found the loophole in using “5 eyes” and social media to do the job. The technical abilities to hack individual consumer devices has to be coming from proprietary industry experts, former and current employees of the big digital giants, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, (I call them the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse). The point is that as long as consumers believe that the horsemen are not malicious, privacy and security will be a thing of the past. Linux boxes were thought of as hack-proof, unless you want to use a browser to visit most sites that require gigantic Google surveillance tool libraries that take over your camera, microphone, etc. Is it any wonder that Google spun up Alphabet, Inc to support the unfettered 3 letter agencies? The question I have is WHEN will the average consumer realize that they have to be as diligent as foreign states are; to prevent surveillance using encryption, to adopt AI guided cyber-defenses, and to stop thinking “they have nothing to hide”. It is gross misdirection to believe that only governments were involved in unethically providing the technology to hack journalists like Sharyl.