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The Justice Department had seized more than 20 telephone lines of its offices and journalists, including home and cell phones. The news organization says it was a "serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news."

The reason behind the tap has yet to be explained, but prosecutors have been reportedly investigating how the AP learned about an al Qaeda plot in Yemen to bomb an airliner in May 2012.

The Associated Press broke the news on May 7, 2012, though the organization did not publish the article for several days at the White House's request since Central Intelligence operations were still unfolding.  

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” Gary Pruit, the president and chief executive of the A.P, wrote to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Monday.

“These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the news gathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s news gathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” said the letter.

The Department of Justice responded, saying "We take seriously our obligations to follow all applicable laws, federal regulations, and Department of Justice policies when issuing subpoenas for phone records of media organizations. Those regulations require us to make every reasonable effort to obtain information through alternative means ..."

However, First Amendment experts say the move was "shocking in its breadth," the New York Times reported, as more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted

Read the whole story at the Associated Press

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