Obama under fire over raids on journalists Even before the FBI conducted 550 interviews of officials and seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation connected to a 2012 article about a Yemen bomb plot, agents had sought the same reporters' sources for two other articles about terrorism. In a separate case last year, FBI agents asked the White House, the Defence Department and intelligence agencies for phone and email logs showing exchanges with a New York Times reporter who was writing about computer attacks on Iran. Agents grilled officials about their contacts with him, two people familiar with the investigation said. And agents tracing the leak of a highly classified CIA report on North Korea to a Fox News reporter drew from electronic archives showing which officials had gained access to the report and had contact with the reporter on the day of the leak. They studied one official's entrances and exits from the State Department, obtained his Yahoo email information and even searched his hard drive for deleted files, documents unsealed this month showed. The emerging details of such cases show just how wide a net the Obama administration has cast in its investigations into disclosures of government secrets. The result has been an unprecedented six prosecutions and many more inquiries using aggressive legal and technical tactics. A vast majority of those questioned were cleared of any leaking. On Thursday, President Barack Obama ordered a review of the Justice Department's procedures for leak investigations involving reporters, saying he was concerned that such inquiries chilled journalists' ability to hold the government accountable. Yet he made no apology for the scrutiny of the many officials whose records were searched or who had been questioned by the FBI. Mr Obama and top administration officials say that some of the leaks have endangered Americans, disrupted intelligence operations and strained alliances with other countries. Some officials are now declining to take calls from certain reporters. The government's willingness to go after journalists' email and phone records without warning their news organisations - a practice that allows them to challenge the demand in court - also appears to be increasing. Steven Aftergood, who directs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said "the latest revelations indicate that reporters' communications are now fair game." Mr Obama, responding to criticism that his administration has gone too far in pursuing leakers, has revived support for enacting a federal media shield law. It would put the decision about whether to subpoena a journalist's phone records before a judge rather than leaving it to a Justice Department official.