New Guide Helps Journalists Know Their Rights When Police Knock
When police applied for a warrant to raid the Marion County Record, they didn’t bother mentioning the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — a federal law that largely bans newsroom seizures. They claimed afterwards that they knew about the PPA but didn’t think it applied (we have our doubts). And the judge who issued the warrant was apparently clueless about the law.
Authorities in Marion are far from the only ones to ignore the PPA. We noted earlier this year that police in Asheville, North Carolina, neglected to mention it when they applied for a warrant to search a journalist’s phone. And federal prosecutors are struggling to explain how the FBI raid of journalist Tim Burke’s Florida home could have complied with the PPA.