NATIONAL
May 20, 2013 | By Ken Dilanian, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The FBI obtained a sealed search warrant to read a Fox News reporter's personal emails from two days in 2010 after arguing there was probable cause he had violated espionage laws by soliciting classified information from a government official, court papers show. In an affidavit, an FBI agent told a federal magistrate that the reporter had committed a crime when he asked a State Department security contractor, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, to share secret material about North Korea in June 2009.
NATIONAL
May 13, 2013 | By Richard A. Serrano, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors secretly obtained telephone records from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press and its journalists in an attempt to learn who leaked information on how the CIA thwarted an apparent terrorist plot hatched in Yemen. The Associated Press on Monday called the action a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news gathering. The government subpoenaed records covering a two-month period in early 2012 from telephones in the wire service's offices in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., as well as the homes and cellphones of at least five reporters and an editor.
NATIONAL
February 12, 2013 | By Ken Dilanian, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - President Obama issued an executive order Tuesday that seeks to shore up the nation's cyber-defenses by improving how classified information is shared between the government and the owners and operators of crucial infrastructure, including electric utilities, dams and mass transit. The long-expected order, which Obama announced in his State of the Union speech, is a stopgap measure that follows Congress' failure last year to pass legislation to create comprehensive standards for the private sector to help thwart digital attacks.
NATIONAL
November 29, 2012 | By Shashank Bengali, Washington Bureau
FT. MEADE, Md. - Pfc. Bradley Manning swiveled in the witness chair, smiling and occasionally talking over his lawyer. In his Army dress-blue uniform, he appeared even younger than his 24 years. It was difficult to reconcile the bespectacled Manning's relaxed, almost chatty demeanor with the vast charges against him - perpetrating one of the biggest leaks of classified material in U.S. history. Manning is accused of providing the anti-secrecy Internet group WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and classified war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq while based in Baghdad as a military intelligence analyst in 2009 and 2010.
OPINION
November 23, 2012
Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) placed a hold on the 2013 Intelligence Authorization Act, expressing legitimate concerns about provisions designed to plug leaks of classified information. Wyden rightly asked his colleagues to revisit provisions that "threaten to encroach upon the freedom of the press" and "reduce access to information that the public has a right to know. " Wyden objects to three provisions. The most troubling would drastically reduce the number of background briefings provided by intelligence officials to the media by authorizing only a few specific officials to engage in such off-the-record exchanges.
NATIONAL
November 9, 2012 | By David S. Cloud, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Seven Navy SEALs, including one involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, have been reprimanded for divulging classified information to the maker of a video game, Pentagon officials said Thursday. The seven received letters of reprimand and forfeited half of their pay for two months after a Navy investigation found they had served as paid consultants to the designers of "Medal of Honor Warfighter," one official said. All are members of Seal Team 6, the secretive commando unit based in Virginia.