Say Anything Blog

Good news from Newsweek:

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - The controversy over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm’s desktop computer, two of his children’s laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.

Whatever your opinions of the NSA program the President authorized to track communications between terrorists, we should all at least agree that it is not the province of unelected government bureaucrats to decide what classified national security information gets out to the media and what doesn’t.  Nor is that the role of journalists.

We elect leaders to Congress and to the White House to make those sort of decisions, and we undermine their authority to do so when we allow leak of that sort of information to go unpunished.  What we promote when we don’t punish these leakers is a culture of government bureaucrats who think they are above the leaders we elect and make decisions to divulge this sort of information, usually with partisan agendas in mind.