Shield Law Compromise Would Protect Reporters and Bloggers

The New York Times - The Obama administration and key Democrats have reached a tentative agreement on a proposed law to provide greater protections to reporters against being fined or imprisoned if they refuse to identify confidential sources.

Under the proposed agreement, a so-called media shield law would allow federal judges to quash subpoenas against reporters if they determine that the public interest in the news outweighed the government’s need to uncover the leaker – including, in some circumstances, disclosures of classified national security information.
The proposal would also extend coverage to unpaid bloggers engaged in gathering and disseminating news information.

It’s too early to say if a package like this can pass Congress. Prospects for a shield law had dimmed significantly in September, when the administration – after intelligence agencies and prosecutors expressed concerns – had taken a harder line against protections for reporters in national-security-related leak cases.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/shield-law-compromise-would-protect-reporters-bloggers/

Supreme Court Takes Texting Case

The New York Times & Wall Street Journal - WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether a police department violated the constitutional privacy rights of an employee when it inspected personal text messages sent and received on a government pager.The case centers on whether a police officer in Ontario, Calif., had a right to privacy for the text messages he sent and received on a pager provided by the police department.

The case opens “a new frontier in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” according to a three-judge panel of an appeals court that ruled in favor of the employee, a police sergeant on the Ontario, Calif., SWAT team.

Orin S. Kerr, an authority on the Fourth Amendment at George Washington University’s law school, said the case was simultaneously significant and idiosyncratic. “This is the first case on Fourth Amendment protection in data networks,” Mr. Kerr said. But the case arose from unusual circumstances, making it fairly likely that the eventual Supreme Court ruling will be narrow.


The Supreme Court has given public employers wide latitude to search their employees’ offices and files. But it has also said that the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable government searches, has a role to play in any analysis of that latitude.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether government employers can read text messages that their workers send and receive on workplace devices.

The city said Sgt. Jeff Quon used his pager to send hundreds of personal messages to his wife, his girlfriend and another officer. Many of the messages were sexually explicit, the city said. The police department obtained transcripts of the officers' text messages while investigating officers who had repeatedly exceeded monthly character limits for the devices.

The San Francisco-based Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the city's review of the messages was an unreasonable search, especially in light of an informal police department policy that it wouldn't scrutinize use of the pagers so long as officers paid the fees for usage that exceeded monthly limits.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126080680568090651.html

Britain, Long a Libel Mecca, Reviews Laws

The New York Times - LONDON — England has long been a mecca for aggrieved people from around the world who want to sue for libel. Russian oligarchs, Saudi businessmen, multinational corporations, American celebrities — all have made their way to London’s courts, where jurisdiction is easy to obtain and libel laws are heavily weighted in favor of complainants.

Embarrassed by London’s reputation as “a town called sue” and by unusually stinging criticisms in American courts and legislatures, British lawmakers are seriously considering rewriting England’s 19th-century libel laws.

A member of the House of Lords is preparing a bill that would, among other things, require foreigners to demonstrate that they have suffered actual harm in England before they can sue here.
English libel law is the opposite of America’s in many ways. In the United States, the plaintiff, or accuser, must prove that the statement in question was false; public officials must also prove that it was made maliciously, with “reckless disregard” for the truth.

In England (Scotland has its own system), the burden of proof rests on the defendant, whose statements are presumed false and who has to establish that they are true.
It is not only news organizations that are running afoul of the law. Environmentalists, anticorruption campaigners, medical researchers and soccer fans posting criticisms of their teams on blogs have all been sued or threatened with legal action in recent years.
The justice secretary, Jack Straw, said recently that he was alarmed about “libel tourism.” And in the House of Commons, a committee has listened to a parade of witnesses denounce the current law as perverse, unfair, prohibitively expensive, contemptuous of free speech and an anachronism in an age when access to articles on foreign Web sites can be obtained anywhere.

“We all have substantial and increasing concern at the potential of the English law of defamation to affect our work unjustly and oppressively,” a consortium of foreign newspapers, publishers and human rights organizations, including The New York Times, said in a statement to the committee.

Noting that “one ‘hit’ in England is enough for a multimillion-pound libel action in London,” the statement called England’s libel laws “repugnant to U.S. constitutional principles.” It said that because of the threat of costly lawsuits, some American newspapers were considering abandoning distribution here and installing firewalls to block access to their Web sites in England.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/11/world/europe/11libel.html