Friday, Aug. 15, 2008 | 2:05 a.m.
FBI Director Robert Mueller III apologized to the editors of The New York Times and The Washington Post last week after the agency said it had improperly obtained phone records from the newspapers’ reporters in Indonesia in 2004 as part of a terrorism investigation. The agency didn’t know the content of the conversations but culled phone numbers used by the reporters. The FBI later deleted that information from its files.
Although it wasn’t his intention, Mueller’s apology made a stronger case for Congress to pass the Free Flow of Information Act, a proposed federal media shield law that was approved by the House but got held up in July by Republicans in the Senate.
The proposed law would allow journalists to protect sources in certain federal court cases, such as those involving government whistleblowers, unless national security is involved or the information is needed to help solve a murder or kidnapping. The legislation also would limit a government agency’s ability to obtain phone records from a reporter.
We commend two supporters of the legislation, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and ranking member Arlen Specter, R-Pa., for pressing the FBI for more details about how and why the agency obtained the records from the Times and the Post. In a letter sent Monday to Mueller, the two senators wrote that “we expect to receive a more complete accounting of this violation of the Justice Department’s guidelines intended to protect privacy and journalists’ First Amendment rights.”
The FBI disclosure, which came about as the result of a Justice Department investigation into the agency’s misuse of letters demanding certain records, is merely the latest example of why a federal media shield law is needed.
We strongly urge the Senate Republicans who initially opposed this bill to switch their votes because a democracy that relies on a free press can ill afford to have federal agencies snooping around journalists’ phone records whenever they so desire.
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