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Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Justice

By Jeralyn, Section Civil Liberties
Posted on Wed Nov 30, 2005 at 11:57:38 AM EST
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The Justice Department claims a Washington Post article about the potential of national security letters for the invasion of privacy of ordinary Americans is inaccurate -- in 17 respects.

WAPO publisher Len Downie disagrees.

the "Justice Department letter does not document any inaccuracies in our story on national security letters, which revealed the widespread use and limited oversight of this investigative tool. The letter relies on words like 'implies' and 'insinuates' to assert claims the story does not make. The story speaks for itself."

I wrote at length about the WAPO article here.

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    Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Justice | 11 comments (11 topical)
    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#1)
    by Sailor on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:33 PM EST
    Currently, the law is silent on whether "any person" includes a lawyer.
    Is it only me or is that the best bit of snark I've ever seen in the MSM?

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#2)
    by swingvote on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:33 PM EST
    I'm not a fan of the extended use of this new tactic, but the Post is splitting hairs in its attempt to defend itself. In the latest article they say: "For example, Moschella's letter said that The Post's article creates "the impression" that the FBI can use the letters to listen to citizens' phone calls or to read their e-mails. But the report explicitly said that the letters "cannot be used to authorize eavesdropping or to read the contents of e-mail."" Yet in the original story we have two different references to phone calls and one to e-mails, both of which certanly do give the impression that NSL are being used to track people's use of the phone and e-mail: Criticized for failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot, the bureau now casts a much wider net, using national security letters to generate leads as well as to pursue them. Casual or unwitting contact with a suspect -- a single telephone call, for example -- may attract the attention of investigators and subject a person to scrutiny about which he never learns. The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work. Catfight indeed.

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#3)
    by Sailor on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:33 PM EST
    jp, I think the WaPo handled it wrong. They should have printed the letter and responded point by point. More importantly, the DOJ did it wrong; They should have put an op-ed in the WaPo and used their space to refute specific charges, not bit*h to congess. When you say the WaPo article was ambiguous, I agree, but the DOJ was also ambigious. And they are a gov't agency, shouldn't we be able to demand more of them than from a corporation?

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#4)
    by swingvote on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:33 PM EST
    Sailor, No, I think we should be able to demand honest reporting from an alledgedly objective news source. Period. And I think the DOJ was correct to go to Congress, as this entire question is a political issue that Congress is currently dealing with. WAPO is spreading misinformation in a transparent attempt to influence the future decisions made. (And it's not as if there wasn't enough they could say without stooping to innuendo). I do like the idea of the DOJ writing an op-ed piece for WAPO to run, but I doubt very much that paper has the integrity to run it.

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#5)
    by Sailor on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:33 PM EST
    No, I think we should be able to demand honest reporting from an alledgedly objective news source. Period.
    I agree, but that has been proven wrong for a long time. Shouldn't the gov't be held to a higher standard (even tho that has been proven wrong for a long time)?

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#6)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:33 PM EST
    Shouldn't the gov't be held to a higher standard (even tho that has been proven wrong for a long time)? No, I don't think they should. I think the idea of different standards is a large part of the problem. Both claim to be telling us the truth, and both should do just that. But if you insist on different standards, I would suggest it should go the other way. I expect my government to lie to me, because it is made up of politicians and they have been lying to me since I was born. The media trumpets itself as the government watchdog and promises to tell us what is really going on when the government is lying to us, but instead it lies as well. In a perfect world, neither would lie. In the world we live in, both will.

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#9)
    by swingvote on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:34 PM EST
    Oh great. Another self-proclaimed "expert". Just what this place needed. WG, I think you undercut your own argument when you make claims like "The reality out there is far darker, their methods far more dirty than most regular people envision, their disregard for laws and civil rights of people second to no other internal security agency," as you come off sounding like just another garden-variety conspiracy theorist. I have no way of knowing, of course, given that I'm not an "expert", but I doubt very much that anyone is being dragged off in the night to a U.S. equivalent of Lubyanka. I'm also pretty sure we don't have a gulag system for political dissenters (although there is always Area 51?) even if we do seem to have developed one for terrorists. And last time I checked, there were no walls with armed guards to keep people in placed around any of our cities or states (there are of course walls to keep people out, but I don't have a problem with those). Finally, you will want to be careful about posting comments on this thread not directly related to the issue of NSLs. Otherwise you'll upset Soccerdad and the rest of the thought police and we'll all have to endure another tirade about "hijacking the thread".

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#11)
    by swingvote on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:34 PM EST
    WG, I was being facetious on the issue of hijacking. I couldn't care less whether Soccerdad or Che gets upset about the direction a thread takes, especially since it seems a certainty that they will no matter what direction it takes. I should correct myself however. This thread is about the catfight between WAPO and the Justice Department over an article about NSLs, not NSLs directly. I understand quite well that a "semi competent political police [could] easily violate civil rights of people in countless other and usually far more damaging ways", but I would take issue with your claim that this is happening here, as well as with your reasoning that dragging people off to their deaths for their political beliefs is not as much damage as one can do to their civil rights. You'll need to show me that these violations are in fact happening and justify how they are worse than killing people or sending them off to slave labor camps in Siberia if you want to pursue that line of thought.

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#13)
    by swingvote on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:34 PM EST
    WG, My apologies. I must have misunderstood. I took "The reality out there is far darker, their methods far more dirty than most regular people envision, their disregard for laws and civil rights of people second to no other internal security agency" to mean that their methods were worse in that they were "far more dirty" and that their disregard for laws and civil rights was of a higher order given that it is "second to none". My mistake.

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#14)
    by Sailor on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:34 PM EST
    I can't believe that some folks hold corporations to a higher standard that our gov't! Once again, shouldn't we be able to rely on the feds to inform us whether we are under attack, have been invaded, water isn't safe, drugs aren't safe, hiways aren't safe ... etc. While the 4th estate, in my POV, has a moral responsibility, they increasingly have a financial stake in lying to us. (See bob woodward) The gov't is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, for the people". Corporations are only subject to the laws of profit.

    Re: Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Ju (none / 0) (#15)
    by Talkleft Visitor on Sat Dec 17, 2005 at 01:06:35 PM EST
    Sailor, You mean you will hence forth be demanding truth and honesty from all politicians, all the time? Glad to hear it. Please let me know when Ted Kennedy comes clean about what really happened at Chappaquidick. Please let me know when John Kerry finally releases all of the details on how he won his medals, including his complete military record. Please let me know when Hillary Clinton finally comes up with a believable explanation as to how those billing records suddenly materialized in the Whitehouse, as well as who it was who hired Craig Livingstone and ordered him to collect confidential FBI files on Republicans. I won't hold my breath while I wait for you to even ask for these things. As I said above, I'm quite used to my government lying to me. It has been doing so my whole life, in ways both big and small. Funny thing is, with the exception of one William Jefferson Clinton, I don't ever remember a President looking me in the eye and swearing he was telling me the truth, but the media constantly presents itself as the truth teller speaking out against power, only to misrepresent, under-report, or outright falsify the stories they then come up with. With specific regard to this story in the WAPO, we already have a clear cut case of their actively working to present an implication that they themselves acknowledge is not the case, so what else isn't true in this story? It's not that I trust the government over the media, Sailor, or want to go easier on them; it's merely that I thought, once upon a time, that we, the people, had an ally in the press. As it turns out, the press sold its soul when it started playing partisan politics at every turn, and now it's up to us alone to work it out.

    Catfight: Washington Post and Department of Justice | 11 comments (11 topical)