FBI Subpoenas Info on Readers of News Story on Slain Agents
WASHINGTON - The FBI issued a subpoena demanding U.S.
newspaper giant Gannett provide agents with information to track down readers
of a USA Today story about a suspect in a child pornography case who fatally
shot two FBI agents in February.
The subpoena, served on the company in April, came to light
this week after the media company filed documents in federal court asking a
judge to quash the subpoena. The Justice Department’s actions were immediately
condemned by press freedom advocates.
The news comes as the Justice Department has disclosed in recent
weeks that it seized the email and phone records of reporters in at least three
separate instances during the Trump administration. It raises questions about
what liberties federal authorities are taking in using news organizations,
journalists and their work as investigative tools.
The subpoena asks for information about anyone who clicked
on the article for a period of about 35 minutes on the day after the shooting.
It seeks the IP addresses — which can sometimes be used to identify the
location of a computer, the company or organization it belongs to, and where it
was registered — along with mobile phone identification information of the
readers.
While the subpoena doesn’t ask specifically for the names of
those who read the story, such identification information could easily lead
federal agents to the readers.
It is unclear why the FBI was seeking information about the
USA Today story, even though numerous others news organizations, including The
Associated Press, had reported extensively on the Florida shooting, one of the
bloodiest days in the FBI’s history.
2 dead, 3 wounded
The suspect opened fire on the agents when they arrived to
serve a federal search warrant in a child exploitation case. The two agents,
Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, were killed and three others were
wounded.
Maribel Perez Wadsworth, the publisher of USA Today and
president of the USA Today Network, said the government wants the news
organization to hand over “private information” about its readers and said it
was fighting the subpoena to protect the relationship between its readers and
journalists. The company also contacted the FBI before asking a judge to quash
the subpoena but did not receive “any substantive reply nor any meaningful
explanation of the asserted basis for the subpoena,” she said.
“We intend to fight the subpoena’s demand for identifying
information about individuals who viewed the USA Today news report,” Wadsworth
said in a statement. “Being forced to tell the government who reads what on our
websites is a clear violation of the First Amendment.”
The FBI agent who signed the subpoena to Gannett has worked
for years on child exploitation cases and has testified in several criminal
cases related to child pornography offenses, newspaper accounts and other
public records show.
The subpoena — first reported by Politico — says the
information is needed as part of an ongoing criminal investigation. Federal
officials would not provide additional details about the investigation.
“This is an extraordinary demand that goes to the very heart
of the First Amendment. For good reason, the courts have generally refused to
give the government access to this kind of sensitive information except in the
most unusual circumstances,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
The Justice Department in recent weeks disclosed that
investigators secretly obtained call records of journalists at The Washington
Post, The New York Times and CNN in an effort to identify sources who provided
national security information that was published in the early months of the
Trump administration. President Joe Biden has said the Justice Department would
not seize reporters’ phone records, though it remains unclear if that promise
can be kept.
“This subpoena, especially when viewed alongside the
subpoenas that the Justice Department served under the Trump administration in
an effort to obtain journalists’ records, strongly suggests we need more robust
protection for records that implicate the freedoms of speech and the press,”
Jaffer said.
The Justice Department — in both Republican and Democratic
administrations — has struggled to balance the media’s constitutionally
protected rights against the government’s interests in safeguarding classified
information and collecting information for criminal cases.
During a 2007 investigation, an FBI agent impersonated an
Associated Press journalist while investigating bomb threats at a high school
in Washington state. The agent portrayed himself as an AP journalist when he
communicated with the suspect online and then sent a link to a fabricated AP
news article that, when clicked, allowed the FBI to pinpoint the suspect’s
location.
The ruse was made public in 2014 and two years later the FBI
imposed restrictions on the ability of agents to masquerade as reporters — but
it stopped short of ruling out the practice.
In 2013, federal investigators secretly seized two months of
phone records for Associated Press reporters and editors that included 20
telephone lines of both AP offices and the journalists, including their home
phones and cellphones.
After that, the Justice Department, under then-Attorney
General Eric Holder, announced revised guidelines for leak investigations,
which require additional levels of review before a journalist could be
subpoenaed.
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