This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 16th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Department of Justice seized phone records of Associated Press reporters as part of an investigation into government leaks.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, discusses how the Department of Justice did it and what it means for press freedom.

The Associated Press has revealed that the Justice Department subpoenaed about two months

of records both from their main switchboard and facts lines and the personal

phones of their reporters as part of a leak investigation, probably into a story reporting on a foiled terrorist plot, a story

that the AP itself actually held on to until they were confident there was no

national security risk involved.

This is pretty extraordinary when you think about the scale of this kind of request,

especially given the rules Justice Department is supposed to follow

when it targets reporters with surveillance tools like subpoenas for phone records.

They didn't get a wiretap warrant of course but just from the

records of who called who when and who called who for how long and you know

what order they called in for for example, did a reporter talk to a source

and then immediately call their editor,

you can get a very comprehensive picture

of what a news organization is working on, what stories

they've got in the works, and of course what they were trying to find out, who their sources

for those stories are.

And it's very hard to imagine why it would be necessary to get one such

a broad temporal span of records and second why it would be necessary not to target particular reporters

...