President Barack Obama said recently that the Department of Justice’s monitoring of reporters as part of national security leak investigations could “chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.”
As far as many journalists are concerned, the president couldn’t have been more right – despite last week’s leaks to the media about secret NSA surveillance programs.
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In conversations with POLITICO, national security reporters and watchdogs said they already have seen increased caution from government sources following revelations that the DOJ had subpoenaed Associated Press reporters’ phone records and tracked the comings and goings of Fox News reporter James Rosen at the State Department.
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“I had one former intel officer say, ‘I hope you’re buying ‘burner’ phones for your sources,’ but I think he may have been pulling my leg,” said David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s national security columnist.
Reporters on the national security beat say it’s not the fear of being prosecuted by the DOJ that worries them – it’s the frightened silence of past trusted sources that could undermine the kind of investigative journalism that Obama was talking about.
Some formerly forthcoming sources have grown reluctant to return phone calls, even on unclassified matters, and, when they do talk, prefer in-person conversations that leave no phone logs, no emails, and no records of entering and leaving buildings, reporters and watchdogs said.
(WATCH: NSA reactions in under 60 seconds)
“The classic leak — of information or of government documents — is becoming more and more difficult and more and more rare because the points of contact between reporters and sources are subject to more and more scrutiny,” Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, told POLITICO.
“Sources will avoid reporters simply so they don’t have to equivocate on a polygraph appearance,” he added. “In the 90s, you could call up government officials out of the phone book. In the years after 9/11, that became absolutely impossible.”
Some reporters and watchdogs argue that the climate didn’t change suddenly but rather slowly over a period of years, the result of intensified leak crackdowns that began during the George W. Bush administration and then expanded under Obama.
(Also on POLITICO: Tech frets public outcry over privacy)
“There is a chilling effect, but it’s as if you were gradually lowering the temperature of your freezer. There’s been a creeping, incremental phenomenon here for several years,” said Adam Zagorin, a Senior Fellow at The Project On Government Oversight. “The chill is cumulative, and the implication is that the government believes that the chilling effect — in order to be effective — needs to be periodically applied, to be imposed on multiple occasions.”
But the slow chill that started under the Bush Administration picked up significantly under Obama, according to reporters. Since 2009, when Obama took office, the Justice Department has undertaken six leak-related investigations — more than all other administrations combined.
“The chilling effect really started with the Bradley Manning episode,” one national security reporter told POLITICO, referring to the U.S. Army soldier who was arrested in 2010 and is currently standing trial for charges of leaking classified videos, army reports, and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.
“Over the last two to three years, there has been a real fear stemming from the Obama administration’s crackdown. Sources will go quiet for months, or stop talking altogether,” the reporter added.
