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Blogger Freed After 226 Days in Jail For Contempt
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 California's shield law allows reporters to keep sources and unpublished material secret.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.'"
Balancing the rights of journalists and the need for information by the legal system is extremely tricky, and to be honest, I'm not sure where the balance should lie in this case. My gut instinct is that the blogger should turn over the video, but part of me is yelling "slippery slope" inside.
The most obvious standard for turning over material would be "criminal activity only," but that isn't liberal enough -- what happens when the alleged act shouldn't be a crime to begin with? (See, for example, the PATRIOT Act and DMCA, in many cases.)
D' Oh! Hit submit too soon.
What I meant to post was....
Journalist: a person who keeps a journal, diary, or other record of daily events.
Blogger: a person who keeps a Web log (blog) or publish an online diary
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.
> ...pasting other people's ORIGINAL writing, you are not a journalist.
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?
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
I'm very disappointed by the first dozen or so Slashdot comments. We all know most people who comment don't RTFA but this case is right up the alley of most Slashdotters...
For those of us still in the world with free thinking and actually use the rights afforded to us by the Constitution, this is a worrisome trend. Since 9/11, local, state and federal officers in both uniforms and plain clothes have been monitoring protesters. In particular, they want to know who the leaders and most vocal of the bunch are. This is then followed by the creation of dossiers outlining the activities of these people who exercise their right to dissent against mainsteam political opinions. With the advent of the PATRIOT act and various other "terrorism" related laws, wiretaps, probing of bank records, etc. are used not only to intimidate but silence anything that Big Brother doesn't agree with.
The point all of you have missed is that Wolf's footage never included vandalism of the police car--which was reported by the city of San Francisco to be nothing more than a broken tail light. The assault on the officer was captured only on a photograph by another protester and was also never part of Wolf's footage. The official reason for the subpoena the video was so the panel could see if any other potential crimes were committed. This however wasn't really the case because it was suspected Mr. Wolf knew the identities of people who choose to mask their faces during the protest. Mr. Wolf refused to turn these over because nothing else was needed from those tapes other than the profiling of activists at the protest and he didn't want to be compelled on the stand to give up those identities. Mr. Wolf and his lawyers believe there is no reason to comply with a Grand Jury not called in good faith to subvert his First Amendment rights--the reason it was called was because apparently Federal funds helped to pay for the police car. He stayed in jail for 286 but eventually gave in. This is very worrisome!
Where is the Slashdot group-think now? So have all of you decided that you're now aligned with dossiers and profiling of people who exercise their Constitutional rights? Are we saying that any footage caught in a public place, even if we don't prompt the said incident, is our responsibility? I hope I'm wrong.
If any journalist can be forced to provide any information (including raw footage of demonstrations and providing sourced) to the police, they will be treated like the police, and we, the public, will get little or no information any more about these events, about these people and their motivations. This is obviously a bad thing.
If just anybody can claim to be a journalist and clam up, police and prosecution will have a lot less evidence to work with and have great problems prosecuting anyone. This is obviously a bad thing too.
The trick is to strike a balance between these public interests. That's a nuanced discussed not ideally suited to slashdot.
One thing you can say is: if this guy withstood 226 days of imprisonment and still didn't turn over the tapes, it seems pretty obvious that the court is taking extreme liberties with this guys personal freedoms, without producing results.
All the more irksome is that the guy went to jail without a real trial. For all we know the tapes, not having been physically entered into evidence, never actually existed, and the whole thing is based on hearsay and a confession.
Of course, the prevailing public mood in any case seems to be "something bad happened, so someone should go to jail". We live in interesting times.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Why isn't there something lower than -1, offtopic? There should be a -3, offtopic, flamebait, troll.
If you're the parent poster, or you have ever posted something like that, then you computer should fry itself. You do not deserve it. Your very presence should make computers homicidal(towards you) or suicidal.
How about this? if you don't like it, don't use it! SIMPLE AS THAT. unlike other OS's, nobody is going to force you to use Linux.
let me guess your age... 13 at max. If you're going to act like an asshole, at least think of something original and get yourself a real ID. At least then I would know who to add to my list of people to ignore.
The GP poster needs to be modded up for actually know what s/he is talking about. From the Wiki page on :
In a televised interview on February 9, 2007, Wolf and his attorney, Martin Garbus...
Wolf stated during his portion of the interview via phone from prison that he has offered to allow the judge to review "in camera" the raw footage to determine if there's any applicable evidence within the video and the U.S. Attorney's office refused the offer based on a legal technicality. Wolf also said that the raw video doesn't offer any more applicable evidence of the arson or assault charges.
It sounds like a witch hunt and you sound just like another poster who needs a good whack with a clue stick.
If you had actually read TFA (oh noes, people on /. don't RTFA???), you would have seen that the footage this guy was withholding did not contain the alleged crimes authorities are investigating, and he had told them from the beginning that that was the case. If you had read any of the other articles about this case, you would also know that the blogger was not concerned about protecting "some people damaging a cop car and setting it on fire," but rather protecting the identities of the rest of the law abiding protesters who had attended the protest. There were serious suspicions that the government was trying to get this tape as a way of documenting the protesters and possibly flagging them as subversives/terrorists/pariahs-du-jour. He was also concerned with the protection of a journalist from having to reveal sources and showing in Court that those protections extend to freelance bloggers as well. Without those protections, the press turns into nothing more than a mouthpiece for the government's "goodspeak." None of which has anything directly to do with protecting a couple vandals.
So basically, if you killed someone on the block and people who saw it are either your buddies or are shit scared of you, you get to walk away free?
Well, yeah. If there's no other evidence against you, then you're home free.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Irony may not be the word, but a person asking other guys to suck his dick, and calling those guys fags is at the least... funny.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
1. TFA clearly states that the footage this guy was withholding did not contain the alleged crimes authorities are investigating, and he had told them that from the beginning.
2. If you take your argument to its most logical conclusion, then no one should get journalistic protection, journalists would constantly be harassed into turning over their sources due to some social need/homeland security issue, and the media would finally completely transform into just a mouthpiece for government goodspeak/doublespeak.
So, what makes someone a Journalist, and therefore protected from potential abuses of authority in order to provide the people with the infomation they need for democracy to be something more than a stage-managed farce?
...
Who decides?
There are 3 options:
A) A journalist is someone 'licenced' as such by a government body. I'm sure everyone can see the danger in that...
B) A journalist is someone 'licenced' as such by a media coporation, such as Fox News, CNN,
C) A journalist is someone who *journals* - who records events for posterity and/or to inform the people.
I personally feel that C is the most sensible, and by far the safest for society. In any rate, FTA: "Wolf, a freelancer, sold some footage to San Francisco television stations and posted it on his Web site, but refused to turn over unpublished material." So both B and C would classify him as a Journalist.
-Chris
During the course of this saga I have repeatedly offered to allow a judge to be the arbiter over whether or not my video material has any evidentiary value.
Down the page just before the video.
http://joshwolf.net/blog/
There is no constitutional right to obstruct an investigation. Quite the reverse. Journalist shields laws are inane precisely because of cases like this.
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.
Clear, Dark Skies
One thing you can say is: if this guy withstood 226 days of imprisonment and still didn't turn over the tapes, it seems pretty obvious that the court is taking extreme liberties with this guys personal freedoms, without producing results.
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.
Actually, that's why we have judges. Judges decide matters of law. And the tape was offered to the judge to view so that he could see there was no evidentiary value to it, it was the government attorneys who refused to allow the judge to view the evidence.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
If this guy knows of some "anarchist" (asshole pis ant) commmiting arson or assaulting a police office, then he has a legal and moral obligation to come forward. If he doesn't, then all he to do was give them the tape and testify that he didn't see anything.
Journalist have too high an opinion of themselves. They publish things from "anonymous" sources (made up, fake but accurate) and then hide behind the 1st to avoid getting caught. They spin facts to meet their political agendas (which they all have...ever hear of Advocacy Journalism?)and omit facts that don't back their interpretation of events.
What was best was him talking about his "ethics". If his ethics allow for arson and assault, then I guess I could whack him upside the head and burn his house down around him.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He was not a journalist, and he was not protecting a source. He was a citizen who refused to cooperate with a police investigation. Not a hero, probably just another victim of his own fantasies and ignorance of what freedom of the press actually means.
Hrm... The BBC called him a reporter so mayhaps that makes it so?
Personally, I believe anyone can call themselves a journalist. There is no international standard and freedom of the press includes any Joe Scmhoe with a blog or a xerox copier.
When the constitution was written, newspapers were basically one page opinion journals written by anyone who happened to own a printing press. You didn't have to go to school, get a license from the government, or have other "journalists" recognize you. Same thing should apply today.
However, I think the key difference was that Freedom of the Press meant the government could not suppress your literature. He wasn't as much as being prevented from publishing as much as he was resisting court subpoena from giving information on it.
Although, what he was doing may not have been covered by Freedom of the Press he stuck by his guns and stuck through it. He could have at any moment gave names and addresses and been a free man, but he choose to actually go through with jail time.
I will give him that... Most of us are hard pressed to bother to vote on election day.
We are lazy and cowards and we have gotten the government we deserved. If there were a hundred thousand more guys like this we'd most likely have a government that stands up for something worth fighting for.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
They don't, actually. They have been given rights that the protesters do not (see among other things the sentences for killing one of either group under roughly the same conditions). This is ridiculous, since the police, acting not as private citizens but as representatives of the government, clearly ought to have fewer rights while on-duty than ordinary citizens.
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.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
off topic even more so, but it's because the admins of the site would rather we focus on promoting over demoting - it says so on the moderation guidelines, thus there's no point to demoting something if it's already at -1
A guilty conscience means at least you've got one.
And what is the penalty for refusing to comply with a testimony order? Life in prison? That sounds like unusual punishment to me, which is constitutionally forbidden.
Oh, and he never got a trial by jury either - despite spending 8 months in prison.
Contempt of court should be a criminal charge like any other, and should require a court trial and sentence like any other crime. It shouldn't result in a person being held in prison indefinitely without a trial.
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.
$META_SIG_JOKE
Look into it a bit more. That assault is not the issue. This case was pushed by a federal prosecutor who was not out to provide justice for that police officer (a California state employee, who is protected under California law). He was out to label these protestors terrorists. Which is absurd, and chilling -- something worth resisting. Almost everyone is conflating the assault with the contempt-of-court finding, but they are different.
As I said above, "A political protest that turns savage is an example of a good thing gone bad. But it is not terrorism."
$META_SIG_JOKE
When I was studying journalism - television production - our teacher told us to bulk erase our source tapes or reuse them. The idea is that it can't be subpoenaed if it doesn't exist. I'm guessing this is based on his participation in the Kent State riots... but I'm not positive.