Journalist Peter Maass: People Think Obama Is A Liberal Democrat, But His Administration Is Cracking Down On Journalists
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Rich Zeoli talked to Peter Maass from The Intercept on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT about a government crackdown on journalist James Rosen and the arrest of his government source.
Maass claimed that Stephen Kim, Rosen's source, was targeted to send a message warning federal employees not to cooperate with journalists.
"I don't think there is anybody in the U.S. government now who thinks that United States national security was jeopardized by the discussion that Kim had with Rosen. There are quite a number of people who are in the government, and I talked with some of them, and people outside of the government who believe that, basically, Stephen Kim was made an example of."
He said charging journalists and sources under the Espionage Act robs the public of information they should have access to and serves as a means to hide information that portrays the government's actions negatively.
"For journalists, this is really a very chilling activity by the government, because what it means is the government -- whenever any of us have a scoop of some sort, maybe based on classified information or maybe just based on information the government doesn't like -- that the government will, perhaps, look at our phone records, look at our emails, track our movements, do everything in its power to find out how we learned what we learned even when, as I think is the case with a large number of national security stories that the media publishes, these are necessary stories that tell us about problems in the government, that tell us about problems in the security situation. These are the kinds of stories that the government, very often, doesn't want to report, and now it's using very draconian laws to crack down on it, to crack down on journalists and to crack down on, particularly, their sources in the government."
Maass stated that, despite the public face of the President's Administration, they are leading the charge against government leaks.
"It is one of disarming aspects of what's going on. People think Obama is a liberal Democrat and he's not going to be leading a crackdown on government officials and on journalists. But the fact is that he is. His administration has pursued more than twice as many leak cases under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined."