CNN Radio News Day: June 6, 2013
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(CNN) – Welcome to CNN Radio News Day. Here are some of the stories we're covering in today's show:
- The federal government has been secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, the National Security Agency obtained a secret court order forcing Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of Americans. Wells Bennett, an expert on national security law at the Brookings Institution, says the government has quite a bit of power to obtain your information:
"The government appears to have argued, and the judge appears to have agreed, that all communications metadata is relevant to an intelligence investigation. That is to say nothing is irrelevant and everything is fair game. That's what's so concerning about this." FULL POST
Freedom of the press
By Libby Lewis, CNN
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(CNN) - The divide between the U.S. and the U.K. over press coverage of crimes is about as wide as the Atlantic.
Cases in point: George Zimmerman, who’s accused of shooting Trayvon Martin last year in Florida – and the cases of Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the two Muslim converts who are accused of butchering to death British soldier Lee Rigby in South London last month.
Zimmerman’s lawyer has used the courts – and the Fourth Amendment – to try to reshape the image of Trayvon Martin, says defense attorney Ron Kuby. He’s done it by getting the press to cover his requests to enter evidence that would link Martin, in the jury’s mind, with the idea of guns, and marijuana and violence.
[:44] “O’Mara’s purpose in releasing all this information he knows can’t come into evidence is to dirty up Trayvon Martin….to portray him in the minds of the jurors as a vaguely menacing young black man,” Kuby told CNN
In other words, O’Mara’s using the court – and the press – “trying to eliminate that image of a totally innocent teenage boy armed with Skittles and iced tea.” FULL POST
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