A US court secretly seized phone and email records from the New York Times. The subpoena was directed at the communication of four journalists in particular. The public might easily have never known this happened, except a quirk in how the story played out. Prosecutors in the US Justice Department were searching for the source of a leak, presumably after a news article had been published and the government wanted to know where the information in that article had come from. The Justice Department has never revealed what leak it was investigating, but the identity of the four reporters who were targeted and the date range of the communications sought strongly suggest that it centered on classified information in an April 2017 article about how James Comey, the former FBI director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential campaign. The news article in question included discussion of an email or memo by a Democratic operative that Russian hackers had obtained. The company Google, which was the provider of email services to the New York Times, resisted giving up the records demanded by the subpoena, and convinced the court to allow the NY Times's executive editor to be told about the subpoena. However, the court imposed a gag order and he was legally prohibited from telling anyone else about it. If Google had not fought to inform the NY Times's executive editor, it is possible the public would not know anything about this story. That gag order has recently been lifted, and the NY Times can publish the story now. U.S. Put Gag Order on Times Executives Amid Fight Over Email Logs (msn.com) The New York Times, Charlie Savage & Katie Benner, June 4, 2021 another related story about law enforcement going after a reporter who wrote a news article, trying to find the source of a leak: police seek retribution on reporter who refused to reveal source of police leak
U.S. Justice Department says it will no longer seize reporters' records in leak investigations Reuters, June 5, 2021 I'm not sure we can even believe them.
Maybe someday reporters will learn emails and phone calls are not safe. But then government will probably issue subpoenas against the news publishing company forcing them to reveal who the journalists are, and then they will issue subpoenas against the journalists threatening to put them in prison unless they reveal who their sources were. At least that will make it a little harder for these courts to hide in the shadows about this, although likely those subpoenas may come along with gag orders. Imagine the government is threatening you with prison unless you tell them where you got the information from, and also threatening you with prison if you even tell anyone else they are threatening you trying to get that information. I think this violates the concept of "freedom of the press".
