Gabe Rottman directs the Reporters Committee’s Technology and Press Freedom Project at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
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Would the revised Justice Department News Media Guidelines have stopped past overreach?
The 2022 guidelines establish express protections for receiving and publishing government secrets.
ICE released a new policy related to gathering information from or about journalists. What does it say? And what are the merits of the policy?
Survey of recent phone and email records seizures shows Justice Department under President Trump markedly more aggressive in pursuing reporters to unmask sources.
After four years of attacks from Trump, journalists thought the worst was over. But Trump’s left a legacy at the Justice Department that Biden’s attorney general will need to undo.
In 1975, Philip Agee, a former CIA case officer who claimed he had become disillusioned with the CIA’s support for right-wing dictators in Central and South America, published “Inside the Company,” a tell-all memoir of his service, which included an appendix naming 250 alleged CIA officers, agents and informants. Agee also founded a magazine called “CounterSpy,” which advocated outing clandestine CIA officers.
There is a lot to digest in the superseding indictment of Julian Assange, which charges the Wikileaks founder with 17 counts under the 1917 Espionage Act in connection with the Chelsea Manning disclosures. But three of those counts represent a profoundly troubling legal theory, one rarely contemplated and never successfully deployed. Under those counts, the Justice Department now seeks to punish the pure act of publication of newsworthy government secrets under the nation’s spying laws.