It was a frightening few weeks in May for journalists concerned with  protecting their sources and for Americans concerned with protecting  their privacy.  Thanks to intelligence whistleblowers like Edward  Snowden, journalists made the public aware of massive secret surveillance  by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Without leaks, we would not have learned about the Bush administration’s  warrantless wiretapping program and the unlawful torture of Iraq War  detainees. More recent leaks reveal the Obama administration’s targeted  assassinations and expanded electronic surveillance.

We know that permission for the Obama administration’s surveillance  was granted by the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.   But everything else about the court remains a secret, its proceedings  and rulings, what argument the government made to justify the surveillance,  and its legal reasoning in granting the authority.

Since its inception 34 years ago, the FISA court has approved more  than 30,000 government requests for surveillance warrants and refused  only 11.  This seems more like a rubber stamp than oversight.

On May 13, the Associated Press (AP) revealed that the Department  of Justice (DOJ) secretly obtained two months of reporters’ call logs.   The DOJ subpoenaed records from 20 telephone lines used by nearly 100  AP reporters and editors.  Within a week of the AP incident, The  Washington Post reported that in 2010 the DOJ subpoenaed emails  from Fox News’ chief Washington correspondent James Rosen’s personal  Gmail.  In both instances, prosecutors sought to build criminal cases  against federal employees suspected of leaking classified information.   These secret information grabs were done without negotiation or advance  notice.

The administration vacuums up reporters’ emails  and phone records in its obsessive war against leaks.  The process  tightens government political control and brings big profits for high-tech  firms.

The new surveillance activity is not directed solely at suspected  terrorists and criminals.  Now we know that the federal government’s  broad communications dragnet spied on millions of supposedly private  phone and internet communications, damaging our democratic ideals and  individual liberties.

A new investigative report reveals, moreover, that the administration’s  crackdown on leaks extends far beyond high-profile cases like that of  Bradley Manning to the vast majority of government agencies and departments  including those with no connection to intelligence or national security.   For about two years, the White House, with scant public attention, has  waged a program called “Insider Threat” that forces nearly five  million government employees and contractors to report any suspicious  behavior of their colleagues.  The program regards leaks to the  media as a form of espionage.

The publicity about the targeting of the communications records of  the AP and Fox News reporters set off a furor among journalists, members  of Congress, and civil liberties advocates about the administration’s  increasingly aggressive record on leak inquiries. On July 24, a deeply  divided House of Representatives narrowly defeated legislation that  would have curtailed phone and internet dragnets by limiting collection  to specific targets of law enforcement.  Just before the House  vote, the DOJ announced it was toughening its guidelines for subpoenaing  reporters’ phone records, and also raising the standard the government  needs to meet before it can issue search warrants to gather reporters’  emails.  And now pressure is building in the Senate to overhaul  the FISA court’s oversight of NSA.

Americans today live in a digital surveillance state.  The erosion  of reasonable restrictions on government’s power to collect people’s  personal information puts the privacy and free speech rights of all  Americans at risk.

Media leakers need not have unlimited immunity, but increasingly it  becomes the only way to conduct serious investigative reporting.   A free press should be free of unreasonable government intrusion in  the news gathering process, creating a proper balance between civil  liberties and national security.

Ralph Scharnau teaches U. S. history at Northeast Iowa Community College, Peosta.  He holds a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University.  His publications include articles on labor history in Iowa and Dubuque.  Scharnau, a peace and justice activist, writes monthly op-ed columns for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald.