March 19, 2006
by Seth M. Goldstein
@ 5:26 pm. Filed under
News,
Politics,
Internet,
Seth,
Media
The freedom of the press, and the First Amendment itself, is in
jeopardy right now in Pennsylvania. The state’s attorney general
recently seized the computers of the
Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, stating that the paper had
“hacked” into a restricted law enforcement Web site with a password
allegedly provided by the Lancaster County Coroner to one of the
paper’s reporters.
The attorney general’s office says that anyone who was not
authorized to view the Web site and did so could be brought up on
criminal charges.
Now a few things are disturbing here:
1) The government, in this case the Pennsylvania state attorney
general’s office, seizing a newspapers computers.
2) The fact that the reporters might be brought up on charges for
accessing the site, when in fact it’s the coroner who gave them
access by providing them with the password.
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’s
Shield Law.
The state’s 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.”(Philadelphia
Inquirer)
The fact that the government took the computers–and is in fact
crying foul–is an outrage. We’re a country with a constitution that
protects the freedom of the press and the freedom of ideas and
thoughts.
Granted, the site was restricted and accessing it was illegal,
BUT the journalists didn’t perpetrate any crime. They accessed the
site only after being provided a password by the county coroner.
And how is this hacking? Here’s the definition of hacking:
breaking into a secure site without proper authorization. They
did not break into the system–the reporters had access via a VALID
password that was provided to them.
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.”
Well if Kirchner didn’t, who did? The reporters had to get it
from somewhere.
By putting the reporters on trial, the government is putting a
cooling effect on the freedoms of the press. Reporters are supposed
to investigate wrongdoing and help expose corruption. How are they
supposed to do this if they have to always question their actions
and fear prosecution? They can’t.
What’s scary is that if the government can do this, where does it
stop? What will separate us from China and other repressive
censoring regimes? Nothing? Maybe.
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.
We’re a free society right? If we are, then why is the government
invading a newsroom?
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.”
It will be interesting to see how this pans out.
-Seth Goldstein
Editor
Keep checking HermesNews for the latest on this developing
story
http://www.hermesnews.goldsteinmedia.com/wordpress/category/media/
