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According to the Webster Groves Police Department, an Endangered Silver Advisory was issued after Michael Eugene Miller contacted his wife and told her that he, while driving, was lost and could not find his way back home.

The branch on South Jefferson has been shut down the past week since the building was damaged during a burglary.

A jury in November had convicted Robert Johnson, 59, of second-degree murder in the death of his wife, Nancy Johnson, 55, in 2018.

Scammers are now mailing sports trading cards posing as gifts, complete with a QR code that promises to verify authenticity.

Mayor Cara Spencer attended a ceremony granting promotions Friday to firefighters who had sued the city for blocking them since 2022.

An American flag flown upside down outside a Ferguson post office Friday morning sparked concern among nearby residents, particularly veterans who view the flag as a powerful symbol of service, sacrifice and national unity.

For journalists who work online, the most dangerous assumption is that press freedom is territorial. It is not. In the digital age, journalists publish globally by default, and states increasingly assert criminal jurisdiction globally as well.

The recent assertion of U.S. authority to seize (kidnapping is such an “ugly” word) Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro illustrates a broader and deeply unsettling truth: Once a state claims jurisdiction, the limiting factor is not law, but power. For journalists, that reality has been quietly unfolding for decades.

Extraterritorial jurisdiction and the press

Domestic law (and law enforcement) does not stop at the border. Most countries reserve the “right” to prosecute those outside the country whose actions are directed inside the country, or which impact that country’s laws, citizens, or property.

The concept of “extraterritorial” jurisdiction of domestic law was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922 in United States v. Bowman, where the court noted that certain criminal statutes apply extraterritorially by their nature when they protect national interests. This is commonly called the “protective” principle of extraterritorial application of law. In the cyber era, courts have applied this doctrine aggressively to online conduct, including speech, publication, and data access.

Journalists are not exempt. While the First Amendment provides robust protection against U.S. prosecution for publishing truthful information of public concern, those protections are not portable. They do not bind foreign courts, nor do they prevent foreign states from asserting jurisdiction over content accessible within their borders.

Journalists prosecuted for online speech abroad

One of the earliest and most influential cases illustrating this problem is LICRA v. Yahoo! Inc., a 2000 French case where the court asserted jurisdiction over Yahoo, a U.S. company, for hosting Nazi memorabilia auctions accessible from France, where French law prohibited the display of Nazi materials.

Although Yahoo ultimately resisted enforcement in U.S. courts, the case established the principle that online publication can subject speakers and publishers to the criminal law of any country where the content is accessible. Countries routinely attempt to enforce their own laws — terrorism, defamation, etc., over the activities of journalists outside their borders.

For example, in Akçam v. Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights recognized the chilling effect of Turkey’s criminal laws on speech, including academic and journalistic commentary. But Turkish prosecutors continue to attempt to use Interpol red notices — which alert law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and detain an individual — to have foreign journalists prosecuted.

In 2023, Russian authorities issued criminal charges against foreign reporters for coverage of the war in Ukraine, alleging dissemination of “false information” about the Russian military — conduct that would be core protected speech in the United States — in violation of the Russian criminal code.

If other countries adopt the Maduro precedent, a foreign country can enforce its laws against U.S. journalists simply by force or power.

China has attempted to use Article 12 of the Cybersecurity Law of the PRC to prosecute those who disseminate online content that “endangers national security” or “damages the public interest” of China. Foreign journalists have been detained, expelled, or prosecuted for online reporting hosted on servers outside China but accessible within it. The Maduro regime itself cracked down on journalists within its own borders, prosecuting them for crimes like terrorism, incitement, and conspiracy.

The United States recently proposed to require those entering the country to provide border agents with access to five years of their social media history, threatening to use this information to ban, arrest, detain, or punish those whose history indicates some vaguely defined “un-American” political persuasion. Moreover, the U.S. government spent years attempting to obtain jurisdiction over Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his publication from abroad of materials the U.S. government claimed could not be published under U.S. law.

There is no ‘there there’

Typically, if speech is permitted (or protected) in the jurisdiction in which it is uttered or published, but prohibited or regulated in another country, the “injured” country has few remedies to go after the speaker/publisher. While it can charge the person with a crime and request that they be extradited, extradition treaties typically require that the conduct be considered “criminal” in both countries. And many countries (including the U.S.) do not typically extradite their own citizens.

Add to that the fact that most extradition treaties also permit the host country to resist extradition for “political speech” or “political activity,” and that an extradition request is subject to both a legal and political process. In addition, the likelihood that a U.S. journalist would be extradited to China, Turkey, or another country for First Amendment-protected activity is small — not nonexistent, but small.

Countries may, however, consider the activities of journalists to constitute violations of surveillance, theft, intellectual property, threat, defamation, or espionage laws, increasing the chance that they will be treated as nonpolitical offenses. Put simply, we extradite whom we want to countries we want for purposes we want. And that’s what other countries do as well.

Kidnapping, rendition, and the Ker–Frisbie Doctrine

What the Maduro case shows is that governments (including the U.S. government) reserve either the right or the pure ability to invade the territorial sovereignty of other nations to obtain jurisdiction over those (including heads of state) we believe have violated U.S. law. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the authority of the U.S. to “kidnap” persons overseas and bring them to U.S. courts — and presumably the opposite applies as well.

Under what is called the Ker-Frisbie Doctrine, the domestic courts do not look at the way the court obtained jurisdiction over the defendant (unless this “shocks the conscience”), but simply look at whether the defendant is physically present.

In the 1886 case Ker v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that a defendant abducted from Peru could still be tried in U.S. court. It affirmed the principle in 1952 in Frisbie v. Collins. In the 1992 case United States v. Alvarez-Machain, after U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents abducted a doctor in Mexico and brought him to trial in the U.S., the court noted that the U.S./Mexico extradition treaty was just “one way” to obtain jurisdiction over a person. Apparently, kidnapping is another. As a federal appellate court made clear five years later in United States v. Noriega, this principle applies to foreign heads of state as well.

What this means for journalists

For journalists, the implication is sobering. Publishing an article, hosting leaked documents, or reporting on state misconduct online can expose a reporter to criminal liability in jurisdictions with radically different views of press freedom.

The fact that the work is lawful — and even celebrated — in the United States offers no protection abroad. We saw that when Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was abducted and dismembered by the Saudi government at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

What typically “saves” journalists is that foreign countries may fear invading the territorial sovereignty of the host nation. This is why most prosecutions of journalists occur in the country in which they are operating. Russia’s prosecutions of Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich follow this pattern, as does the Turkish government’s detention of freelance journalist Lindsey Snell in Turkey in 2016.

In a networked world, journalism is inherently transnational, but press freedom is not.

However, if a journalist can be lured into a compliant country, or if other countries adopt the Maduro precedent, a foreign country can enforce its laws on people in the U.S. simply by force or power. Instructive is the case of Henry Liu, a Chinese American critic of the Taiwanese government, which hired Taiwanese gang members to kill him in California, or the attempted murder in Brooklyn, New York, of Iranian-American journalist Masih Alinejad.

While journalists and others may be protected by the First Amendment, that protection typically applies only if they are physically in the United States, and assumes that the U.S. has no interest in extraditing the journalist to another country. With the Maduro precedent extending the authority to kidnap those who we perceive to have violated the law of one nation, other nations can be expected to follow suit. It’s no longer about what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called “international niceties” but is about “a world, … the real world, … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Law as narrative, power as reality

The lesson for journalists is not that the law is meaningless, but that it is secondary. Power determines who is charged, who is seized, and who is left alone. Law supplies justification after the fact.

In a networked world, journalism is inherently transnational, but press freedom is not. For journalists who work online, the question is no longer merely, “Is this lawful where I am?” It is, “Who might claim jurisdiction, and what can they do to enforce it?”

The answer, increasingly, depends less on courts than on geopolitics.

In cyberspace, publication is global. So is exposure.

The chairman of the Missouri House Budget Committee expects the fiscal year 2027 will be smaller than the one the state is currently operating under.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this sponsored Spotlight episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, host Ben Whitelaw […]

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