PA. Attorney General Seizes Newspaper Computer Drives to Catch Leak Source

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/14084455.htm
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Philadelphia Inquirer
Posted on Mon, Mar. 13, 2006

Pa. seizes paper's computer hard disks
The Attorney General's Office says they may show evidence of a felony:
unauthorized use of a restricted Web site.

In an unusual and little-known case, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office has seized four computer hard drives from a Lancaster newspaper as part of a statewide grand-jury investigation into leaks to reporters. The dispute pits the government's desire to solve an alleged felony - computer hacking - against the news media's fear that taking the computers circumvents the First Amendment and the state Shield Law...

"This is horrifying, an editor's worst nightmare," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington. "For the government to actually physically have those hard drives from a newsroom is amazing. I'm just flabbergasted to hear of this." The grand jury is investigating whether the Lancaster County coroner gave reporters for the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal his password to a restricted law enforcement Web site. The site contained nonpublic details of local crimes. The newspaper allegedly used some of those details in articles.

...Officials said the Internet histories and cached Web-page content retained on the newspaper's computer hard drives could contain evidence of a crime - unauthorized use of a computer. To properly search the computers, state lawyers argued, they needed to haul them to a government lab in Harrisburg... another lawyer for the newspaper, Jayson Wolfgang, said the search was illegal, and troubling. "The government simply doesn't have the ability or the right, nor should it, in a free democracy, to seize the work-product materials, source information, computer hard drives, folders with paper, cabinet drawers of a newspaper."

Any questions children?

What amazes me about this story is that it was not a matter of trying to get evidence to convict a murderer, or trying to uncover some threat to national security. Instead, they confiscated the hard drives of a newspaper's computer system so they could find out who looked at the website of the County coroner.

(FYI: Lancaster County includes about 400,000 people and is an hour and half west of Philadelphia.)

Here's an article from the affected newspaper:

http://local.lancasteronline.com/4/21274

That article said that the newspaper offered to turn over prints of emails involving the matter, but the Attorney General said that was insufficient. The State Supreme Court refused to intervene.