Keeping Your Data Safe When Reporting From The Field
It’s not uncommon for police to seize cellphones and other equipment from journalists who are covering protests. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented at least 49 cases of equipment searches and seizures targeting journalists covering protests, and many of those have happened in the last year.
One case that I want to highlight is the case of Dilan Gohill. He is a student journalist at Stanford for The Stanford Daily, and he was arrested last June while he was covering a student protest on campus. It was a pro-Palestinian protest in which protesters broke into a campus building and barricaded themselves inside, and Dilan, in his capacity as a reporter, was with them to report on what was happening.