Blogger Freed After 226 Days in Jail For Contempt 224
frdmfghtr writes "Over at CNN is a report that a blogger has been freed after spending 226 days in jail — a record for a journalist held in contempt. 'Wolf had been found in contempt for refusing to obey a subpoena to turn over his video from a July 2005 protest during the G-8 economic summit where anarchists were suspected of vandalizing a San Francisco police car. One city officer was struck during the rally and his skull was fractured ... California's shield law allows reporters to keep sources and unpublished material secret. But there is no federal shield law protecting reporters from federal investigations. The National Writer's Union, which represents freelance writers, said in a statement that Wolf should never have been jailed. "The abuses visited on Josh and other journalists are part of an effort by governments at all levels to control the volume, flow and content of the information that reaches the public," the union said.'"
Re:Blogger jailed? (Score:1, Interesting)
National Writer's Union has it backwards here (Score:2, Interesting)
Except in this case Josh is the one trying to hide information. If that tape got out the "peaceful" protestor's PR spin of doing nothing wrong would be shattered.
Re:When your news content model consists of merely (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you bother reading the article? This guy was not just a blogger who got the latest digg.com headlines and commented on them. He had a camera and went down in the trenches to obtain original footage. Yet he is not registered as a journalist.
But the thing most people here miss -- even if he was a journalist they could still have jailed him. The law protects him from local police investigations, not from Federal investigations. He was easy prey.
On the other hand... WTF dude, a cop was almost killed and you refuse to hand over the tape?
Re:A small matter of fructured skull (Score:2, Interesting)
He obviously had reasons for not giving it up. It could be that there was other information on the same tape he didn't want prosecutors to see. It could be that it was terribly inconvenient to provide the video. It could be that there was nothing on the video in the first place. Or heck, it could be that he video taped himself vandalizing the car.
It's his private property, and the government has no right to it, or at least should not have a right to it. The slippery slope has already been laid for the government to take whatever property they want - just about anything could be justified with one lying cop, one aggressive prosecutor, and/or one judge.
Re:How is this insightful? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and the fact that the government was willing to take over the case from California State officials, claiming that the case belonged in Federal jurisdiction because the SF police department receive a little Homeland Security money, shows just how far the government was willing to go to do an end-run around the California shield law.
Re:So far everyone has missed the point... (Score:3, Interesting)
The purpose of a shield law is to allow people to speak privately to journalist ( and BTW, I'll agree that Wolf qualifies as a journalist ). If he has private interviews of the rioters, they should be protected. If he personally knows the rioters - and there are reasonable claims that he does - that information is private and should be protected.
But the riots were a public act. Wolf taped them as anyone - including the cops - could have.
The real question here is: should a journalist should be allowed to take something that is public and make it private, and then claim protection under privacy laws?
No, there is no slippery slope. (Score:4, Interesting)
What is a journalist? In an era when every single one of us "publishes" online, why aren't we all journalists? Given that we are, by any sane definition, all we have to do whenever subpoenaed is assert our right as journalists to keep our information to ourselves just in case we want to publish them.
Even prior to this era, shield laws created a special, unregulated, class of citizen: "The Journalist." Unlike every other type of American, Journalists are permitted to keep secrets without oversight. While the government is supposed to conduct all it's operations in public, while celebrities have no expectation of privacy whatsoever, while intimate details of all of our lives have alway been available to anyone who wandered down to the county courthouse, we have decided that noble Journalists are uniquely trustworthy and do not require any scrutiny of their motives and actions?
Feh.
Re:What am i missing? (Score:3, Interesting)
No. What you can say is it hasn't produced results. No extreme liberties were taken. He refused to comply with a testimony order and, like thousands before him, sat in jail awaiting the time he would or they decided they didn't need it any more for some reason. Perfectly legal as it was his choice to not cooperate with bringing felons to justice.
Re:When your news content model consists of merely (Score:3, Interesting)
But, yeah, there were other witnessess to the crime, so I don't entirely get why they were going after him so hard. Nor why it become a federal matter in the first place.
It is **NOT** a police investigation (Score:2, Interesting)
He isn't withholding information from a police investigation because this isn't a police investigation. It's a federal terrorism investigation. The federal prosecutor is alleging that these people have engaged in terrorism. That is a repulsive accusation: the truth is, the video shows a sad case of a political protest turned violent. Protest is a first amendment liberty ("petition for redress"), and the violence here was a bad thing. But there is no way to color this picture as terrorism.
The assault on the police officer is in the bailiwick of the state of California, not the federal government. Everyone seems to be confusing those two. FWIW I hope California has caught the guy who did this assault.