First They Came For Indymedia…
A couple of years ago there was a minor stir in the blogosphere when Indymedia’s servers were seized by the FBI. Despite clear US and UK government interference in the freedom of the press, the regular media, other than blogs, hardly covered the story. “First amendment? Free speech? Hey, Indymedia’re just hippie pinkos – not proper journalists. Only proper journalists with the proper opinions should be protected. And we decide who’s a proper journalist. “
Proper journalists – journalists like Judith Miller perhaps? Miller and her bought and paid for colleagues, who howled piteously when their own records were subpoenaed? Cue big media hooha, ‘constitution under threat’, journalists outraged!, blah blah blah blah. Miller, a proven liar and corrupt to boot, was rewarded for protecting Bushco in the Plame affair with a hagiographic Vanity Fair article written by a friend. The manipulated mouthpiece of government, remade as a First Amendment martyr in a classic piece of Roveian revisionism.
In the meantime the government’s assault on a free media continues. But hey, I don’t suppose the editor and reporters of the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal attend many New York or DC cocktil parties or have a weekend getaway on the Eastern Shore….
Pa. seizes paper’s computer hard disks
The Attorney General’s Office says they may show evidence of a felony: unauthorized use of a restricted Web site.
By John Shiffman
Inquirer Staff Writer
In an unusual and little-known case, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office has seized four computer hard drives from a Lancaster newspaper as part of a statewide grand-jury investigation into leaks to reporters.
The dispute pits the government’s desire to solve an alleged felony – computer hacking – against the news media’s fear that taking the computers circumvents the First Amendment and the state Shield Law.
The state Supreme Court declined last week to take the case, allowing agents to begin analyzing the data.
“This is horrifying, an editor’s worst nightmare,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington. “For the government to actually physically have those hard drives from a newsroom is amazing. I’m just flabbergasted to hear of this.”
The grand jury is investigating whether the Lancaster County coroner gave reporters for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal his password to a restricted law enforcement Web site. The site contained nonpublic details of local crimes. The newspaper allegedly used some of those details in articles.
[…]
Grand-jury investigations are secret. But some details trickled out when a lower-court judge in Harrisburg, Barry Feudale, held hearings last month to consider the newspaper’s motion to stop the state from enforcing its subpoena for the hard drives.
Officials said the Internet histories and cached Web-page content retained on the newspaper’s computer hard drives could contain evidence of a crime – unauthorized use of a computer. To properly search the computers, state lawyers argued, they needed to haul them to a government lab in Harrisburg.
Senior Deputy Attorney General Jonelle Eshbach argued that this was not a case of a journalist’s right to protect a source but an attempt to use the First Amendment to shield a crime.
“We know the source,” she said. It is a password-protected Web site, she said, essentially “a bulletin board in a locked room, and it is getting into that locked room and seeing the bulletin board that makes this a crime.”
At the hearing, another lawyer for the newspaper, Jayson Wolfgang, said the search was illegal, and troubling.
“The government simply doesn’t have the ability or the right, nor should it, in a free democracy, to seize the work-product materials, source information, computer hard drives, folders with paper, cabinet drawers of a newspaper,” he argued.
Feudale ruled Feb. 23 that the state could seize the computers but view only Internet data relevant to the case. The judge also ordered the agent who withdraws the data to show them to him first – before passing them to prosecutors – to ensure that the journalists’ other confidential files are not compromised. The ruling was stayed pending appeal to the State Supreme Court.
In the newspaper’s appeal, DeStefano argued that the ramifications of allowing government officials to have control over a newspaper’s computers, no matter the restrictions imposed, are frightening.
“Permitting the attorney general to seize and search unfettered the workstations will result in the very chilling of information,” DeStefano wrote. “Confidential tips, leads, and other forms of information will undoubtedly dry up once sources and potential sources learn that Lancaster Newspapers’ workstations were taken out of its possession and turned over to investigations.”
In response, the state argued that “the newspaper has not produced one shred of evidence that the computer hard drives contain information protected from disclosure.”
In a one-page order dated Wednesday, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case
Independent media, local newspapers, bloggers… are the mainstream media next? That belwether of the die-hard Bushniks, Instapundit, has said quite blatantly “The press had better hope we win this war, because if we don’t, a lot of people will blame the media”. There’s certainly an appetite in wingnuttia to just muzzle the press and to hell with it. ‘No man, no problem”, as China has just proved yet again with the connivance of a US corporation. Whatever makes the precious darlings of the NYT and WaPo think that their owners wouldn’t roll over in a heartbeat, just like Yahoo does?
All those Miller supporters and over-entitled old media princelings who cried wolf on press freedom over the NYT’s role in Plame – when the government starts to clamp down on them and their newspapers (and it will, because they themselves enabled that) will anyone be listening to their howls of outrage?
Tags Media Press Freedom Censorship Crime Judiciary Courts Pennsylvania
