US Government secretly obtains phone records from journalists

Federal prosecutors secretly obtained telephone records from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press and its journalists in an attempt to learn who leaked information on how the CIA thwarted an apparent terrorist plot hatched in Yemen. It is believed that government prosecutors were probing the source(s) of a May 7, 2012, AP report, which disclosed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had prevented a terrorist plot by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Peninsula. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Connecticut, and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.