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The Story of the Day came with a hat tip to The Guardian of London. It snared the scoop of a secret search warrant granted by the secret court set up by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. The warrant allowed spies at the National Security Agency to add the logs of three months of telephone calls across the entire Verizon network to its database. All three newscasts filed double-barreled coverage of the scoop. All were certain that this one Verizon warrant was no aberration. Instead it is typical of a seven-year-old industrywide program of secret data collection. CBS and NBC, with substitute anchor Ann Curry, led with the NSA. Even though ABC gave it just as much coverage, unaccountably it decided that weather should be its lead, making this the sixth day out of the last nine weekdays with an ABC weather lead.

CBS' Major Garrett and ABC's Jonathan Karl filed from the White House on the spying. CBS' Garrett told us that the Obama Administration admits that its spies are tracking the telephone numbers involved in calls and how long the conversations last, but not the content of the conversations nor the identities of those speaking. ABC's Karl pointed out that Barack Obama had been outraged at such NSA surveillance when he was a senator back in 2007.

NBC assigned its round-up of the controversy to Andrea Mitchell in its DC bureau. Mitchell, as she often does, included a couple of soundbites she had gathered earlier in the day on her own lunchtime cable news Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC. ABC also assigned the story to its investigative reporter Brian Ross. He noted that both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration had tried to make their data collection obscure. Both ran the incriminating soundbite from Congressional hearings:

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR): "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?"
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: "No, sir."

CBS went to its in-house ex-spook John Miller for an explanation of meta-data-mining. He reckoned that the NSA is currently storing the telephone logs in a system called PRISM, a scaled-back successor to the overreaching Stellar Wind surveillance system. He claimed PRISM had led to the search warrant that led to the protection of the New York City subway system from the Denver-based bomb plot of Najibullah Zazi. This is how the nightly newscasts covered that foiled plot when the story broke back in the fall of 2009.

NSA spies are not only keeping tabs on our telephone calls, NBC's Pete Williams added. With a second hat-tip to The Guardian and to Washington Post, Williams reported that it is also live-monitoring the content of Internet communications via warrants against the servers of Internet Service Providers. ABC's Ross and CBS' Miller reported on the same monitoring.

An Investigates feature also showed up later on NBC. Michael Isikoff revealed that, according to the FBI, spies from the People's Republic of China had been active back in 2008, when an invitation.zip virus wormed its way into the computer systems of the Presidential campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain. Isikoff publicized the efforts of Kroll Securities at protecting Obama's secrets. He also told us that China denies the accusation.
Andrew Tyndall 6/7/13 8:36:24 pm

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