Investigating the Investigative Reporters

The feds are looking at reporter's phone records to ferret out confidential news stories, according to ABC News's blog, The Blotter.

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Link.

This is not unexpected, given the government has publicly said it was gunning to find investigative reporters' sources and has already fired a senior career CIA official for merely not disclosing contact with a Washington Post reporter.

It does make the first entry of this blog seem more than a little prescient, let me also remind privacy-conscious reporters who feel they need to buy pre-paid cell phones that they should pay with cash, have someone else (pick a homeless guy on the street and pay him $10 ahead of time and $10 later) buy the phone so your image isn't caught on surveillance cameras, and be careful where you use the phone since the feds could use tower location data to tie the phone to you.

And yes, by the way, this is what happens when you build a surveillance architecture.†

It becomes VERY tempting to turn it to purposes it was never intended for.