State Attorney General Seizes Newspaper Hard Drives

The First Amendment is under attack: Amendment I - Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

BBB

State Attorney General Seizes Newspaper Hard Drives
By Mark Fitzgerald
Published: March 14, 2006

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office has seized four computer hard drives from a Lancaster newspaper, the Intelligencer Journal, as part of a grand-jury investigation into leaks to reporters. The state Supreme Court declined last week to take the case, which allows agents to begin analyzing the data.

The decision has alarmed free-press advocates as word of the seizure spreads. "This is horrifying, an editor's worst nightmare," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "For the government to actually physically have those hard drives from a newsroom is amazing. I'm just flabbergasted to hear of this."

Pennsylvania's shield law, and the federal Privacy Protection, let down the Intelligencer Journal, the president and CEO of the Lancaster newspaper's publishing company said Tuesday.

Harold E. Miller, president and CEO of Lancaster Newspapers Inc., told E&P in a telephone interview that the paper had gone as far as it could in appealing the seizure order. "It's our concern that the protections afforded by the Pennsylvania Shield Law, the First Amendment, and the Privacy Protection Act weren't applied in this case," he said. "That's what's disappointing because a lot of our argument hinged on the shied law and privacy protection law."

In a decision little noticed outside of southeastern Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court last week ruled that the state Attorney General's Office can search four of the newspaper's computer hard disks as part of its ongoing investigation into allegations that the Lancaster County coroner gave his computer password to Intelligencer Journal reporters, giving them access to a Web site restricted for use by law enforcement only.

Prosecutors allege the access to the site, where unreported details of crimes are available, amounts to a felony.

The reporters maintain the coroner, Dr. G. Gary Kirchner, gave them the passwords and permission to access the site. Kirchner has denied that. A grand jury is investigating the alleged breach, but no one has yet been charged in the case.

According to an article in the Lancaster New Era by Janet Kelley and Ad Crable, court documents show the Intelligencer Journal offered to give investigators printed versions of items they requested, including e-mails, but the state attorney's office said it wanted to scan the hard drives for material related to the restricted site, known as the Lancaster County-Wide Communications' Computer Assisted Dispatch. (The Intelligencer Journal and the New Era are owned by Lancaster Newspapers, and operate with separate and independent staffs.)

In court, the state's attorney's office said it could scan for only material relevant to the investigation.

Senior Judge Barry F. Feudale, who is presiding over the grand jury, said he would personally review all the material before it is turned over to prosecutors, the New Era reported.

Those "strict guidelines" for the disk scanning are small comfort, Miller said.

"It seemed to us that protecting this kind of material from government seizure is the point of the shield law," Miller said. "What the court said was, we hear you, but we think there's more merit on the other side of this, on the state's ... argument."

The newspaper's fear now, he added, is that the decision will discourage sources from bringing important information to the attention of journalists.

"What happens when another issue pops up, and people see that the shield law didn't protect us?" Miller said. "It will have a dampening effect on our ability to bring news and information to the public, and that's what the shield law is all about."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Fitzgerald ([email protected]) is E&P's editor-at-large.