A federal judge has told the Justice Department it can't rummage through a Washington Post reporter's seized electronics, given interests "so directly at odds with the press freedom values at stake." Magistrate Judge William B. Porter ruled Tuesday that the court will oversee the search of devices taken last month from reporter Hannah Natanson's home, acknowledging the risks of the government's proposal for an "unsupervised, wholesale" trawl through a journalist's work product, reports the New York Times. Allowing a DOJ filter team to search through the information, "most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources," "is the equivalent of leaving the government's fox in charge of The Washington Post's henhouse," the judge wrote, per CBS News.
Natanson's devices were seized as part of a classified information case against government contractor Aurelio Perez-Lugones. The Post, which praised the ruling, had argued prosecutors only have a legitimate need for a sliver of what was taken and cited First Amendment and attorney-client concerns in asking that the government be blocked from reviewing the data.
Porter said it was his hope that the government aims to gather evidence of a crime, "not to collect information about confidential sources from a reporter who has published articles critical of the administration." But he sharply questioned why the DOJ failed to mention the Privacy Protection Act—which sharply restricts searches of journalists' materials unless they are personally being investigated for a crime—when it sought the warrant. That omission "has seriously undermined the Court's confidence in the government's disclosures," he wrote. He will now set a court-run process for reviewing the materials, with a hearing slated for March 4.
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