Posted on
Mon,
Mar. 13, 2006
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.
If the reporters used the Web site without authorization, officials
say, they may have committed a crime.
In interviews yesterday, the reporters' lawyer, William DeStefano,
and the coroner, Gary Kirchner, disagreed over whether Kirchner had
given them permission to access the site.
DeStefano said that although he didn't know whether any of the
reporters used the Web site, "evidence has been presented to the
attorney general which makes it clear that the county coroner, an
elected official, invited and authorized the paper or reporters
access to the restricted portion of the Web site... . If somebody is
authorized to give me a password and does, it's not hacking."
The coroner said yesterday that he had not "to my knowledge"
provided the password or permission to the reporters.
"Why would I do that?" Kirchner said yesterday. "I'm not sure how I
got drawn into something as goofy as this."
State agents raided Kirchner's home outside
Lancaster last month and took computers, he said. He said he had had
no other contact with authorities since.
The morning Intelligencer Journal is owned by Lancaster Newspapers
Inc., which also publishes the afternoon Lancaster New Era and the
Sunday News.
The Intelligencer Journal's editor, Raymond Shaw, was compelled last
month to testify before the grand jury, which is based in
Harrisburg. Yesterday, he declined to comment on the case.
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 on procedural grounds, freeing the state to examine
the hard drives.
Contact staff
writer John Shiffman at 215-854-2658 or
jshiffman@phillynews.com.
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/14084455.htm |
