United States

The IRS scandal, the Justice Department’s AP phone records seizure, and Edward Snowden’s leaks

Also in May 2013, Obama joined Republicans in roundly castigating the Internal Revenue Service after revelations that employees of the department had excessively scrutinized conservative groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. Obama asked for and accepted the resignation of the department’s acting commissioner and promised to reform the department, but, unsatisfied, Republicans led further investigations into the matter.

That month Republicans as well as many Democrats also were outraged over revelations that the Department of Justice, as part of an investigation into a news leak related to a foiled terrorist plot, had subpoenaed and seized two months’ worth of phone records of reporters and editors who worked in several Associated Press offices in May 2012 without notifying that organization. Despite Attorney General Eric Holder’s explanation that the news leak was serious, Republicans characterized the action as an egregious violation of the First Amendment and again pursued further congressional inquiries.

The government’s accessing of phone records was again the issue when in June 2013 Edward Snowden, an American intelligence contractor, revealed through The Guardian newspaper that the National Security Agency had compelled telecommunications company Verizon to turn over metadata (such as numbers dialed and duration of calls) for millions of its subscribers. He also disclosed the existence of a broader data-mining program that gave the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Government Communications Headquarters—Britain’s NSA equivalent—“direct access” to the servers of such Internet giants as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Snowden was charged with espionage by the U.S. and ultimately ended up in Russia, where he received temporary refugee status. In August, Bradley Manning, who had provided the Web site WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010, was convicted of espionage and theft, among other charges, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.