Originally Posted By: Wonder Boy
 Originally Posted By: the G-man
Why reporters fear Team Obama: Relying on the 1917 Espionage Act, which was rarely invoked before President Obama took office, this administration has secretly used the phone and e-mail records of government officials and reporters to identify and prosecute government sources for national-security stories.



This is almost exactly what communist China did by other means. Hacking into e-mail accounts of New York Times reporters, and tracking who they were in communication with.

We are officially an authoritarian regime now.



In fairness, attorney general Jeff Sessions two days ago threatened to do the same thing to track down leakers, at a press conference saying to leakers on camera "Don't do it", basically because DOJ has ways to cyber-track them back to the source.

The Obama administration began the abuses, and NSA against their will was revealed by Ed Snowden to be collecting the mete-data of every U.S. citizen, recording every phone conversation and every e-mail to be pulled out and sifted through later, if they feel any person is a potential threat. Once that genie is out of the bottle, I guess it's hard for any future administration to avoid the temptation to do the same to find their adversaries.

Again, I dislike what Snowden did and think he's a traitor (giving all that NSA information first to the Chinese, then going to Russia, and now living probably the rest of his life in Russia). But he was accurate in saying this much:
"This is the last generation that will even know what privacy is"