Mark Klein, the former AT&T engineer who was the source for the New York Times story revealing the telecommunications giant was wiretapping the internet under the auspices of the US government, reportedly took his story first to the Los Angeles Times, where it was summarily spiked by an editor. Brian Ross and Vic Walter report for ABC News that Dean Baquet, then the Los Angeles Times editor and now the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, spiked the piece at the request of John Negroponte, who was then director of National Intelligence and Michael Hayden, who was then director of the National Security Agency (NSA).
Ross and Walter report that Baquet acknowledges he talked with Negroponte and Hayden but insists “government pressure played no role in my decision not to run the story.” Baquet goes on to tell the ABC News team, “we did not have a story, that we could not figure out what was going on” in Klein’s technical documentation.
The NSA will neither confirm nor deny Klein’s allegations but Negroponte invoked the “state secrets privilege” in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T, claiming Klein’s information and the lawsuit itself could “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”
Baquet, as Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, now manages the “reporters who have broken most of the major stories involving the government surveillance program, often over objections from the government,” Ross and Walter point out.
Look ma, there’s a new verb on the horizon. Don’t hold your breath waiting for any new government surveillance stories from the New York Times—they’ll all be Klein-spiked. All this and more from the same paper that brought you the false stories about WMD in Iraq and has still failed to explain why it sat on its original warrantless wiretapping story for a year at the government’s request.
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