Judge says government may not search devices seized from Post reporter

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: msn/Washington Post

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A federal judge in Virginia rejected the Justice Department’s request to search through a Washington Post reporter’s electronic devices as part of a national security leak investigation, ruling that the court would instead be responsible for conducting the search.

The Tuesday ruling suggested that Magistrate Judge William Porter did not trust the government to conduct a narrow search of the devices and feared that such an examination could risk exposing more than 1,000 of the reporter’s government sources to the Justice Department.

“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Porter wrote.

Porter also sharply criticized prosecutors for not briefing him in their search warrant application on a federal law that protects reporters against searches in many situations: the Privacy Protection Act of 1980. Their failure to inform him about the law before he approved the warrant in the case “has seriously undermined the Court’s confidence in the government’s disclosures in this proceeding,” he wrote.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/judge-says-government-may-not-search-devices-seized-from-post-reporter/ar-AA1X0hUk

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Link to ORDER (PDF) - https://washingtonpost.com/documents/820e7a03-efb5-4c3c-a02b-d9b5a48ef737.pdf