State Attorney
General Seizes Newspaper Hard Drives
By
Mark Fitzgerald
Published:
March 14, 2006
5:25 PM
ET
CHICAGO
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 (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com)
is E&P's editor-at-large.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002158413
