The Department of Justice’s decision to covertly collect significant amounts of phone call data of the Associated Press is just another sign that we live in a country where the government has grown too big for its britches.
According to a letter sent by the AP to the Department of Justice protesting the action, the DOJ secretly gathered information about AP phone calls for two months. The records include outgoing calls made on more than 20 telephone lines, including general telephone lines and a fax at AP offices in Hartford, Connecticut, New York City, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as records related to the calls of five reporters and an editor. Although the government has not said why it collected the records, the five reporters and editor worked on an AP story about a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled a terrorist plot to blow up a plane and the Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation of the leak that led to the story. The White House was unaware of the subpoenas and the gathering of phone records because the Department of Justice handles such actions independently.
Of course, reporters aren’t immune from prosecution if they commit criminal acts — but due regard for the First Amendment requires that any intrusion into news-gathering be strictly limited and carefully targeted, based on a particularized showing of need. It’s hard to see how the DOJ action conformed to such restraints. Finding out who the AP called goes to the heart of news-gathering, and collecting records on more than 20 phone lines used by AP employees hardly seems targeted or sensitive to First Amendment issues. Instead, it seems like a fishing expedition — and perhaps one specifically designed to chill vigorous exercise of First Amendment rights. And, of course, the veil of secrecy that the DOJ places over criminal investigations, and the lack of involvement by the White House, will make it difficult to hold people accountable for the action.
Stories about overreaching government employees and lack of accountability have become all too commonplace. I think it’s one reason why many people have turned to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, hoping that the the written words will serve to restrain governmental excesses. As the DOJ action in this instance show, however, written words have an effect only if people are paying attention to them. How many of the DOJ employees who approved the broad collection of AP phone records, in their zeal to catch a leaker, really gave serious thought to what their actions were doing to the AP’s First Amendment rights?
The three women — Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight — apparently were held captive for years in a house on Cleveland’s near West Side. 
Like every American, I’m angered and sickened by the terrorist actions of the Tsarnaev brothers, and I can understand the impulse to deny a final resting place on American soil to someone who cruelly and intentionally killed and injured innocents . . . but I say let Tsarnaev be buried. A controversy about his remains is just a distraction from the real issues raised by the Tsarnaev brothers and the Boston Marathon bombing — issues like whether they should have been permitted to come to America in the first place, how they came to be radicalized and whether there are steps that can prevent others from becoming similarly radicalized, 
I’m amazed at the criticism, from right and from left, that is being directed at the authorities. Shouldn’t Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be read his Miranda rights immediately? Shouldn’t he be treated, instead, as an enemy combatant and tried in a military court? Why didn’t the FBI do more to identify latent terrorist tendencies when it received inquiries about Tamerlan Tsarnaev from a foreign nation? Why didn’t the police put together Tamerlan’s lack of American friends, his prior bout with domestic violence, and his YouTube viewings of radical Islamic videos and identify him as a likely terrorist?
The news stories today are all about these brothers, who came to the U.S., lived here, and somehow became radicalized to the point where they ruthlessly killed innocents without a second thought. I’m sure many people enjoyed hearing that the dead brother’s body was so riddled with bullet holes they couldn’t even be counted; there is still force to the notion of an eye for an eye and a thirst for outright vengeance.
No terrorist group or domestic fringe organization has stepped up to claim responsibility for the attack
The 
The stories are about the verdicts in an awful rape case. Two players on the Steubenville high school football team, the “Big Red,” were found guilty of raping an inebriated 16-year-old girl after an underage drinking party and then taking pictures of the victim. The 
A Dutch researcher tried to determine if there are patterns to the generation of malicious email used in spam, phishing, and other fraudulent scams. It was a huge task, because there are more than 42,000 internet service providers worldwide. The researcher found, surprisingly, that 
Senior abuse is a tough problem to quantify. 
Univision has focused on the impact of the nearly 2,000 guns that the BATF allowed to be “walked” out of the United States into Mexico. Amazingly, the BATF lost track of the weapons, many of which ended up in the hands of Mexicans gangsters. Univision has identified “Fast and Furious” weapons that were used in murders, kidnappings, and mass killings. Some were used by hit men who opened fire on a birthday party of young people in Ciudad Juarez, killing 14 and leaving another 12 wounded. Others were part of an armed attack on a rehabilitation center where 18 people died. By any standard, the BATF’s operation has been a bloody disaster — and the human toll has fallen mostly on Mexico, which already had its hands full with drug lords and mounting violence even before the American government foolishly decided to allow hundreds of weapons to cross the border.
If the prosecutors had pursued a forced disclosure of the notebook, the case would have 
