From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Adam"  wrote in message
news:441826bd$1{at}w3....
> http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/14084455.htm
>
> Ah the march of globalization. Soon the US & the PRC will have a common
> set of methods wrt law & order.
>
> "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.""
>
>
> There's no problem with this in the PRC so why is there a problem in the
> US?
>
> Adam

It's not the feds and appeals will echo throughout the system

I wonder what the paper will do if it is proven that their reporters
illegally hacked into a law enforcement site?

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."

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."

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