“We’re out for scalps.” That’s what a senior Justice

Department official told me when I asked what was behind the Obama

administration’s

unprecedented number of leak

prosecutions.

The “we” referred

to federal prosecutors, but the official said the desire to see

leakers punished extended to the White House, as well. The

official, who also made it clear that reporters who talked to

sources about classified information were putting themselves

at risk of prosecution, asked not to be quoted by name.

Many journalists have attributed

President Obama’s historic leaker hunt to some kind of personal disgust he has for the spilling of state secrets.

Jonathan Alter wrote in his book

The Promise: President Obama, Year One, “Leaks offended Obama’s sense of discipline and reminded him of everything he disliked about the capital. He was fearsome

on the subject, which seemed to bring out his controlling nature to an even greater degree than usual.”

I’ve come to believe this interpretation, which I had shared, is way off.

Simply put, the government is pursuing leaks, and

leakers, because it can. And I mean that it has the technological

capabilities

to track and monitor government employees’ phone calls and

e-mails in a way it hasn’t in the past. And it can, with relative

ease, figure out which reporters sources are talking to, and

how.

Last year, when I was reporting a story about the

Justice Department prosecutor who was in charge of two high-profile

leaks

cases, I had occasion to call his predecessor. I wanted to speak with him about a legal document he’d written

in one of the cases; I had obtained a draft copy of it, which

was never filed with the court.

I reached

Steven Tyrrell, who’s now in private practice,

at his law firm in Washington. He declined to talk to me about the

case, and then said he

wanted to quickly end our conversation. “I’ve done

investigations like this, and I know that the longer I stay on phone

with

you, the more suspicious it looks,” he told me.

Investigators don’t need to record what was said on

the phone call between a reporter and his source to know that they have

a relationship. The phone log will tell them that. I

appreciated Tyrrell’s candor, and that he has mastered a tenet of

investigative

reporting 101: When calling sources, don’t talk on the phone

too long. Arrange a place to meet, then hang up.

Based on the deep reporting on and documents

from

leak cases, it’s clear the government has made the electronic

records of reporter-to-source communications the evidentiary

centerpiece of its cases. But as another ex-senior official at

the Justice Department told me, investigators have better tools

to track those communications now—and, more important, better

access to them. This person, who was a political appointee,

also asked not to be identified. But he said that in many of

the cases the government has prosecuted, electronic evidence

of a relationship between reporter and source was at the heart

of the cases.

I wrote in my book,

The Watchers,

about how the National Security Agency created “mirror”

databases of telecom network traffic, essentially taking the

records from companies like AT&T and putting them into a form

that could be mined by the intelligence agency.

Two former NSA officials say they believe that capability has allowed the government to track reporters and their sources.

Bill Binney and

Kirk Wiebe helped the agency build

information-collection and analysis tools. They were, in effect, data

miners. They quit the agency

after the 9/11 attacks because they thought NSA was designing

systems that weren’t very good at catching unknown terrorists,

but that would be very good for spying on known Americans and

rapidly finding connections among people based on their communications.

Ironically, one colleague who shared Binney and Wiebe’s concerns was

Thomas Drake. He tried to sound an alarm through internal channels about NSA wasting billions of dollars on surveillance systems that

didn’t sufficiently protect privacy. When he couldn’t get the response he wanted, Drake talked to a reporter at the

Baltimore Sun. She won an award for investigative reporting in the public interest. Drake was indicted under the Espionage Act. How did

investigators build their case? In large part, based on Drake’s e-mails and internal NSA computer logs.

The point here isn’t that investigators are more

philosophically inclined to go after leakers now. It’s that they have

more

opportunity. Government employees are as wired and e-mail-bound

as the rest of us. And no prosecutor is going to overlook

hard evidence of what he believes is a crime; especially when

the word from on high is to “collect scalps.”

Now, this theory has been questioned by recent events. Senator

John McCain has accused the White House of

leaking about two highly classified intelligence programs: the so-called

“kill list” the President

approves for drone

strikes,

and a cyber-war campaign against

Iran. According to McCain and other like-minded lawmakers, the White

House is the home of the leakers, not their pursuers. The

President’s aides strategically revealed these huge covert

operations just in time to bolster Obama’s image as a strong

commander-in-chief.

This is nonsense. Put aside the fact that the

President who oversaw the death of the world’s most notorious terrorist,

and

who has authorized drone strikes, needs no help burnishing his

tough-guy cred. These stories, by their authors’ own accounts,

have been in the works for months. The story about the Iran

cyber-operation (code-named Olympic Games) by

New York Times reporter

David Sanger was released to coincide not with the election, but with the publication of his new book,

Confront and Conceal. Indeed, the newspaper article is drawn

directly from the book. (Sanger

got rare, and arguably preferential, access to nearly every senior

national security official in the administration. Clearly, his reporting

wasn’t based entirely on unauthorized leaks.)

Sanger had also been writing stories

about the cyber operation for months and had gone right up to

the line of pinning it on the United States, which is what his

most recent story finally did. Sanger himself, speaking on

the

Diane Rehm Show last Friday, called McCain’s White

House conspiracy theory “silly.”

Investigators are now trying to figure out who talked

to Sanger and other reporters for their scoops. The first place they’ll

start? E-mail and phone records. There’s always a known list of

people who’ve been “read in” on a classified program. (In

the intelligence business, it’s called the BIGOT

list.) From there, it’s a

simple

matter to find a trail. Of course, if Sanger and his colleagues

are as industrious as their reporting suggests, investigators

may not find one.

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