Freedom of the Press

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

This week saw President Donald Trump threatening journalists with bogus prosecutions and his administration bringing charges against another whistleblower. But the federal government is far from the only bad actor when it comes to press freedom these days. Read on for more.

Whistleblower prosecution has nothing to do with national security

Courtney Williams, a former Army employee, has been charged under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle to journalist Seth Harp on sexual harassment and discrimination she experienced and witnessed. Harp cited Williams as a source in his 2025 book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” and an article in Politico Magazine.

Freedom fo the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said, “The notion that an administration that casually posts genocide threats during its illegal wars is worried about national security risks from whistleblowers who expose sexual harassment is absurd.”

• Read our statement

DOJ wants to scrap the Presidential Records Act

FPF Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper wrote for The Intercept about a bogus legal opinion that the PRA — the Watergate-era law establishing that presidents’ records are public property — is unconstitutional.

The Justice Department, Harper writes, “is effectively claiming that the presidency has private ownership over the American story.” You can use our action center to tell Congress to speak out against this attack on transparency.

• Take action

No kings in DC, no compliance in LA

The Los Angeles Police Department obstructed, threatened, and arrested journalists covering the third round of “No Kings” protests — violating a federal injunction.

Watch FPF Deputy Director of Advocacy Adam Rose — who was on the ground in LA that day — explain what he witnessed. And if you’re a journalist who faced a press freedom violation, contact our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which is documenting the violence in LA.

And speaking of injunctions officers violated left and right, Rose has another video about an appellate ruling upholding a similar court order against the Department of Homeland Security for its press freedom violations. There’s plenty more to see on our YouTube channel.

• Watch more

The Republican about-face on Qatari media funding

A few years ago, then-Sen. Marco Rubio and his colleagues successfully urged the first Trump administration to force Al Jazeera to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

But the second Trump administration, in which Rubio serves as secretary of state, is putting its weight behind Paramount Skydance’s acquisition of CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery, even though the deal is financed, in part, by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund. Stern wrote about how the reversal shows that past fearmongering over foreign investment in media, including Al Jazeera and TikTok, had nothing to do with the supposed security risks and everything to do with controlling the narrative.

• Read more

Judge tells Pentagon to stop censoring journalists again. Think they’ll listen this time?

Federal Judge Paul Friedman entered anorder yesterday compelling the Pentagon to comply with hisprior prohibition on enforcing its unconstitutional press policy.

Stern said in a statement that, although we appreciate Friedman granting The New York Times’ motion to compel, “at this point, any court order that responds to the administration’s blatant lawlessness with anything less than sanctions, contempt of court findings, and attorney disciplinary referrals is a disappointment.”

• Read more

Sources aren’t safe when surveillance is for sale

Government agencies frequently evade the Fourth Amendment with the “data broker loophole” — using taxpayer dollars to buy sensitive, personal data about Americans and others from private data brokers.

FPF Senior Advocacy Adviser Caitlin Vogus explains that the use of data brokers for immigration enforcement has shown just how invasive this surveillance can be and how the government could use this purchased spy power to target journalists and their sources.

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Trump’s threat to jail reporters deserves bipartisan condemnation

On Monday, Trump threatened to jail unnamed journalists if they do not reveal their sources for reporting about the mission to rescue airmen shot down in Iran. (Later in the week, he bizarrely threatened CNN with prosecution over completely accurate reporting).

Stern said in a statement, “Some of the most important news stories in American history have come from confidential sources, including stories that have brought down corrupt presidents. That’s why Trump is so obsessed with leaks.”

• Read more

So-called ‘antifa’ prosecutions endanger the First Amendment and the press

We joined Defending Rights & Dissent and the National Lawyers Guild for a conversation about the Prairieland case in Texas, which the Trump administration is touting as its first successful domestic terrorism prosecution of “antifa.”

The defendants’ possession of anarchist zines was repeatedly touted as evidence of … something or other, even though the zines had nothing whatsoever to do with any alleged crimes any of them were accused of committing. That’s concerning to everyone who depends on the First Amendment, including the press.

• Watch the discussion

Check out our digital security team’s three-part series to help journalists better understand risks of using artificial intelligence and set boundaries around which AI systems and tools make sense to use, adjust, or avoid.

This isn’t just a tragedy. It’s a pattern enabled by impunity — and by U.S. political and military backing.

A new FBI budget request would give NSPM-7 real teeth. Journalists who report on matters arguably fitting within the nebulous scope of the presidential memorandum on domestic terrorism should take note.

The district thinks a journalist filing 14 Freedom of Information Act requests in a year is a reason to sue to ban him from filing any more. Wait until they find out how many FOIAs FPF files.

Constitutional limits are increasingly being replaced with commercial transactions, putting Americans’ privacy and the free press at risk. But our representatives on Capitol Hill will soon have a chance to plug that gap.

The Fourth Amendment was designed to protect us from government searches and seizures without a warrant. But government agencies can evade this requirement with the “data broker loophole” — using taxpayer dollars to buy sensitive, personal data about Americans and others from private data brokers.

Although we’ve known about this problem for a while, recent reporting about the use of data brokers for immigration enforcement has shown just how invasive state surveillance fueled by data broker purchases can be. That reporting also has important lessons for how the government could use this purchased spy power to target journalists and their sources.

Investigative outlets like 404 Media have been at the forefront of exposing how government agencies are using data brokers to power the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. The commercial data the government is exploiting can be drawn from everyday apps like those for weather, gaming, or news.

404 Media used public records to report on Customs and Border Patrol’s purchase of online advertising data that it can use to follow people’s “precise movements over time” by tracking their phones.

It also reported on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s use of tools based on commercial location data to monitor phones in entire neighborhoods. This kind of location tracking can identify who is using a particular device by tracking where they live or work, and can then be used to follow their movements.

According to 404 Media, ICE has also turned to Palantir, a notorious data mining and surveillance company, to find neighborhoods to raid and to create dossiers on potential targets for deportation. At least one of Palantir’s tools is powered by a Thomson Reuters product called Clear, which sells “names, addresses, car registration information, Social Security numbers, and details on someone’s ethnicity.”

Together, this and other reporting make it obvious that the Department of Homeland Security is ramping up surveillance capabilities based on the data broker loophole. And this tactic isn’t limited to immigration enforcement. In the past, the government has used data it purchased to track users of a Muslim prayer app and protesters in the racial justice movement, for instance.

With the Trump administration determined to prosecute journalists and their sources, it’s reasonable to be concerned that the data broker loophole could be used in leak investigations, too. The Department of Justice has pledged to target leakers, and the FBI has already raided one reporter’s house in connection with a national security leak investigation.

In March, FBI Director Kash Patel, who once promised to “come after” the media, testified before Congress that his agency was once again purchasing Americans’ data and location histories as part of federal investigations.

Data purchased by the government for leaks investigations could reveal reporters’ contacts with sources, with potentially devastating consequences for reporter-source confidentiality and press freedom. For instance, the government could buy location data for the devices of journalists and suspected leakers to determine if they visited the same locations at the same time. It could purchase internet records to determine if a suspected source visited a news outlet’s website or searched for a particular journalist.

The Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this kind of warrantless surveillance. But as the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Jake Laperruque noted recently, the government currently operates under a “spy first and ask forgiveness later mentality.”

Now, Congress has a rare opportunity to fix this. A new bill, the Government Surveillance Reform Act, would reauthorize and reform the government’s foreign intelligence surveillance powers under Section 702 of FISA. Crucially, it would prohibit law enforcement and intelligence agencies from buying sensitive information that otherwise would require a warrant.

Whether it’s being used for out-of-control immigration sweeps or to spy on journalists and their sources, the data broker loophole has become an insidious bypass to the Bill of Rights. The government shouldn’t be able to buy its way out of the Constitution. It’s time for Congress to close the data broker loophole.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Washington, D.C., April 9, 2026 — Federal Judge Paul Friedman today entered an order compelling the Pentagon to comply with his prior prohibition against enforcing its unconstitutional press policy, which restricts journalists from asking questions to “unauthorized” personnel. The order was accompanied by a 20-page opinion explaining why the Pentagon’s revised policy was just a rehash of the one he struck down, and in some ways worse.

The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern:

“We appreciate Judge Friedman seeing the Pentagon’s revised policy for the nonsense it is and granting The New York Times’ motion. The Constitution, of course, allows and encourages journalists to ask questions to anyone they want, authorized or unauthorized, and to publish the answers they get.

“But at this point, any court order that responds to the administration’s blatant lawlessness with anything less than sanctions, contempt of court findings, and attorney disciplinary referrals is a disappointment. It’s easy to write opinions listing the myriad ways the administration flouts the Constitution and court orders. The hard part is doing something about it. The administration will likely play more games to avoid complying with today’s order as well. Hopefully, Judge Friedman will rise to the moment.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

In August 2020, then-Sen. Marco Rubio and several of his colleagues urged the first Trump administration to force Al Jazeera to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A month later, Trump’s Department of Justice granted their request.

The largely Republican coalition argued that Qatar created unspecified security risks by funding a media outlet that operated inside the United States and influenced Americans. Similar arguments led Congress to pass, and the Supreme Court to uphold, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act to force the sale of TikTok.

What a difference a few years and a $400 million jet make.

The Trump administration is now putting its weight behind Paramount Skydance’s plans to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery with help from sovereign wealth funds from Gulf States — including Qatar — which reportedly committed this week to investing up to $24 billion.

Trump, now-Secretary of State Rubio, and the other Republicans once alarmed by the supposed threat of Qatari-funded media are silent on potential significant Qatari backing of CNN and HBO (which Warner owns). The proposed investment has been public knowledge since last year.

The hypocrisy underscores why the government shouldn’t decide who owns or finances media, no matter who is in the White House, particularly absent a specific, imminent national security threat. Such authority will invariably be politicized to steer ownership away from any given administration’s critics and toward its allies, with foreign influence as a mere pretext.

As Justice Hugo Black famously said in the Pentagon Papers case, “the word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment.”

The administration doesn’t care if Ellison, the Qataris, or anyone else meddles with CNN, as long as they do so in ways the president likes.

The self-serving Republican about-face on foreign investment proves Black right. Paramount Skydance is led by Trump ally David Ellison, who has a proven track record of MAGA-fying news outlets and who has reportedly promised Trump the “sweeping changes” he wants at CNN. Put simply, Trump is confident that the new CNN will serve his interests better than the old one, precisely because he expects ownership to influence coverage.

Ellison has offered assurances that his foreign investors won’t meddle in news decisions, but there’s no indication that the administration intends to do anything to confirm that’s true. And Ellison has little credibility. He has also said he won’t meddle, which is almost certainly nonsense given his track record.

The bottom line is the administration doesn’t care if Ellison, the Qataris, or anyone else meddles, as long as they do so in ways the president likes.

Similarly, it was never about whether foreign powers’ alleged influence through Al Jazeera (or TikTok) harmed America’s interests. It was about whether those outlets furthered the agendas of those in power, for example, by supporting wars they bankrolled. Foreign ownership just offered the government a hook to punish and harass them when they didn’t.

Fearmongering about threats from Al Jazeera arose largely from the outlet’s critical coverage of Israel and, later, that nation’s U.S.-funded war in Gaza. Israel has taken it further, baselessly labeling Al Jazeera reporters terrorists as an excuse to target and kill them.

But as Trump recently said, “When somebody’s nice to me, I love that person. Even if they’re bad people, I couldn’t care less.” Now that a Qatari sovereign wealth fund seeks to invest in media that he believes will be nice to him, Trump could “care less” about supposed security risks. The U.S. government welcomes Qatari media money.

Same goes for TikTok. The worries about Chinese propaganda were really about anti-war sentiments catching on with young people. The panic about surveillance was a red herring.

If China were looking to surveil Americans’ social media activity, it could have bought the data TikTok allegedly enabled it to monitor straight from the data brokers that the same lawmakers refuse to rein in with comprehensive privacy legislation.

The marketplace of ideas isn’t limited to domestic ones.

Tellingly, when Trump became president and stalled the TikTok sale that was supposedly so urgently needed, none of them seemed to mind.

That’s not to say Al Jazeera and TikTok are above criticism — they’re certainly not. Maybe Qatar and China do influence their content. We can’t prove otherwise, any more than we can prove the British government doesn’t meddle with the BBC. But Americans who don’t like Qatar’s influence, if any, can go elsewhere. The marketplace of ideas isn’t limited to domestic ones.

And any Qatari influence likely pales in comparison to the influence Trump’s administration seeks to exert over private media outlets in the U.S., let alone government-funded ones. Has Qatar ever threatened to jail Al Jazeera journalists for not outing their sources, or to criminally investigate them for accurate reporting, let alone both in the same week?

Trump would probably be insulted by the implication that foreign governments can propagandize his constituents — he and his domestic allies like the Ellisons are doing just fine at that on their own, thank you very much.

In any event, Trump, presumably, won’t be president forever. Assuming the Paramount transaction goes through, what’s to stop a Democratic administration that dislikes the new CNN from accusing foreign investors of dictating its content and demanding it register under FARA, or labeling Qatar a foreign adversary and weaponizing the law used to ban TikTok against CNN’s websites and apps?

Never mind whether the coverage they dislike is really dictated by Qatar, as opposed to the Ellisons or whatever hacks they hire to run their news outlet. Foreigners are far easier to scapegoat. Yes, there’s the First Amendment, but the Supreme Court was all too willing to throw it aside when it came to foreign-funded media in the TikTok case. Just mumble something about national security and data privacy, and you’re in the clear, apparently.

For now, any Republicans who are legitimately concerned about risks to national security (as opposed to their own reputational security) from foreign ownership of U.S. media could prove it by opposing Qatari investment in CNN, just like they did with Al Jazeera and TikTok. They’d be wrong, but at least they’d be consistent.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Washington, D.C., April 9, 2026 — Courtney Williams, a former Army employee, has been charged under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle to journalist Seth Harp on sexual harassment and discrimination she experienced and witnessed during her military tenure. Harp cited Williams as a source in his 2025 book, “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” and an article in Politico Magazine.

The government’s complaint is vague about what classified information Williams disclosed and what, if any, risk it contends the information posed to national security, as well as on the tactics used to obtain information about Williams, Harp, and their communications.

The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern.

“Ask anybody who has read ‘The Fort Bragg Cartel’ which they think is the real threat to national security: Seth Harp’s sources, or the rampant corruption and criminality they enabled him to document. The administration knows the answer to that question, and that’s why it wants to punish whistleblowers and chill investigative reporting by bringing cases like this one.

“The charges also underscore why the Pentagon’s unconstitutional efforts to limit journalists’ access to everything except ‘authorized’ information are so outrageous. Does anyone think Pete Hegseth or his authorized PR flacks would have voluntarily disclosed these abuses to their briefing room of stenographers? Of course not. This is very clearly a retaliatory, anti-transparency prosecution and nothing more. The notion that an administration that casually posts genocide threats during its illegal wars is worried about national security risks from whistleblowers who expose sexual harassment is absurd.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Washington, D.C., April 6, 2026 — President Donald Trump today threatened to jail unnamed journalists if they do not reveal their sources for reporting about the mission to rescue airmen who were shot down in Iran. Trump was quoted as saying, “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say, ‘National security. Give it up or go to jail.’”

The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern:

“Donald Trump has long harbored bizarre fantasies about having journalists arrested and even sexually assaulted in prison for refusing to burn their sources. But journalists don’t work for the government and their right to publish government leaks is protected by the First Amendment which, despite Trump’s efforts, remains the law of the land. It does not disappear whenever the words “national security” are uttered. To the extent that the government is allowed to withhold information, it’s up to the government to keep its secrets, not journalists.

“Confidential sources are the lifeblood of investigative journalism. Sources who come forward at great personal risk won’t do so if they don’t trust that their identities won’t be revealed, as Trump knows well from his days impersonating publicists to brag about himself to reporters. Some of the most important news stories in American history have come from confidential sources, including stories that have brought down corrupt presidents. That’s why Trump is so obsessed with leaks. It has nothing to do with national security.

“In fact, Trump’s hatred of the press runs so deep that, in his haste to lock up journalists for doing their jobs, he may have inadvertently threatened Israeli journalists and officials who were reportedly behind the story with prison. Anyone who for some reason considers taking Trump seriously next time he goes on a half-baked anti-press rant should remember that.

“Just a couple years ago, the PRESS Act — a bill to protect journalist-source confidentiality that would have expressly prohibited Trump from following through on threats like today’s — received bipartisan support, including from many of Trump’s allies, like Sens. Mike Lee and Lindsey Graham. It passed the House unanimously, with nine Republican co-sponsors. Any lawmaker who rightly supported that legislation or otherwise pontificated about press freedom and journalist-source confidentiality in the past but doesn’t speak out now is a free speech hypocrite.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Court wins against Trump administration censorship keep stacking up. But that’s certainly not stopping them from trying. Read on for more on the week’s press freedom news.

For Brendan Carr, localism is a red herring

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr loves to talk about localism — the idea that broadcasters should serve the needs and interests of their own communities — whenever he’s confronted about his abuse of the FCC’s powers to try to censor the news.

But as we saw last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he touted President Donald Trump’s “wins” against the media, localism is a red herring. As Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern wrote in The Intercept, without exception, Carr’s threats and investigations against broadcast news outlets involve segments on national news that offend Trump. The only time he involves himself with local news is to help consolidate ownership in the hands of conglomerates known for decimating local newsrooms.

• Read more

Centralizing data is about surveillance, not security

FPF Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper joined National Public Radio’s “1A” program to talk about our lawsuit to find out how Trump’s 2025 executive order to eliminate “information silos” is really being used to create a massive centralized database to monitor the activities of Americans.

It’s sure to be abused by nefarious actors both inside and outside the government.

• Listen here

NPR, PBS ruling explains why all Trump censorship is illegal

A judge struck down the administration’s defunding of NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service as unconstitutional retaliation for airing content that displeased it.

We explained in a statement that the court is exactly right — it’s well established that the government can’t condition benefits on censorship it can’t achieve directly. That goes for PBS and NPR, but it also goes for Carr shaking down broadcast licensees, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth denying access to reporters who don’t follow his unconstitutional rules, and more.

• Read more

News isn’t contraband

What if the Nixon administration hadn’t asked a court to bar The New York Times and Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, resulting in the seminal Supreme Court ruling further strengthening the law against “prior restraints”?

Rather than seeking such an extreme judicial remedy, what if President Richard Nixon had federal agents barge into the Times’ and Post’s newsrooms, seize the Pentagon Papers and all other national defense documents in the outlets’ custody, and refuse to return any of them, claiming they’re all criminal “contraband”?

Stern explained that a legal theory floated by the Biden administration in prosecuting journalist Tim Burke and now adopted by the Trump administration could lead to Trump or others censoring reporters by simply taking their stuff, without involving the courts at all.

• Read more

Reform Section 702 of FISA

Section 702 of FISA, the surveillance law that allows the FBI and intelligence agencies to spy on Americans’ communications without a warrant, is up for renewal in Congress. The law has been repeatedly misused, including to monitor journalists and activists. Yet the Trump administration and some Democratic lawmakers are pushing Congress to reauthorize Section 702 without significant reforms. You can tell Congress to reject that effort with our action center.

We wrote about our recent conversation with four experts: Dell Cameron, an investigative reporter for Wired who covers privacy and national security; John Dickas, Sen. Ron Wyden’s deputy chief of staff; Trevor Timm, executive director of FPF; and Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress.

• Read more

“We have seen a disturbing pattern in this war and in the decades prior of Israel accusing journalists of being active combatants and terrorists without providing credible evidence. Journalists are not legitimate targets, regardless of the outlet they work for.”

The State Department should do everything in its power to secure the release of journalist Shelly Kittleson without escalating the illegal war that may have endangered her in the first place.

The ruling confirms that authorities violated Texas journalist Justin Pulliam’s constitutional rights when they arrested him and kicked him out of a press conference. Read our 2024 interview with Pulliam.

There are steps you can take to keep your communications private even if Congress renews Section 702. Our latest “Ask a security trainer” advice column offers technology measures you can implement now. You can also read about how VPN use may affect your privacy in our latest digital security newsletter.

“Nobody knows what routine conduct the administration is going to figure out a way to go after next,” Stern said. “The only discernible rule that you can figure out if you’re a journalist trying not to be targeted by this administration is to self-censor.”

Kevin Gosztola interviewed FPF Board Chair Rainey Reitman about her new book on how journalists are targeted for financial censorship.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Washington, D.C., March 31, 2026 — A federal judge today blocked the Trump administration from ending federal funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.

The following can be attributed to Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):

“As the court said, it’s long been the law that the government can’t circumvent the Constitution by conditioning benefits on censorship where it can’t censor directly. That goes for publicly funded media, but it also goes for Brendan Carr’s FCC conditioning broadcast licenses or merger approvals for private media companies on editorial concessions to please Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth conditioning access to the Pentagon on journalists forfeiting established rights, or Trump himself steering transactions like the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger to supporters of his who promise him ‘sweeping changes’ to bend the news to his liking.

“Virtually all of the administration’s ‘wins’ in reshaping the media that Carr and Trump have bragged about at CPAC and in social media posts violate this well-established constitutional principle. More news outlets should sue and win.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

Section 702 of FISA, the controversial surveillance law that allows the FBI and intelligence agencies to spy on Americans’ communications without a warrant, is up for renewal in Congress. The law has been repeatedly misused, including to monitor journalists and activists. Yet, the Trump administration and some Democratic lawmakers are pushing Congress to reauthorize Section 702 without significant changes.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) recently spoke to four experts about Section 702: Dell Cameron, an investigative reporter for Wired who covers privacy and national security; John Dickas, Sen. Ron Wyden’s deputy chief of staff; Trevor Timm, executive director of FPF; and Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress.

We talked about how surveillance affects freedom of the press and other First Amendment rights, and how Section 702 should be reformed to help limit the government’s power to spy on Americans.

Vitka emphasized how the government has overreached using Section 702 powers, highlighting examples of spying on Black Lives Matter protesters, elected officials, and judges. “When the executive branch gets to decide who they’re spying on and at what degree they can spy on them on its own, they inevitably do too much,” Vitka said. “They do things that chill our speech.”

Vitka said that Congress should not reauthorize the law without requiring a warrant before the government can search data collected under Section 702 for Americans’ communications. Congress must also close the “data broker loophole,” Vitka said, which currently allows the FBI and other agencies to buy data on Americans that they otherwise would require a warrant to access.

Timm, too, explained that Section 702 surveillance can be abused, including in ways that impact the press. “A journalist’s lifeblood is their ability to keep their sources safe and confidential from government intrusion or any other control, any other intrusion,” Timm explained. “If the government is able to vacuum up, for example, all of a journalist’s international contacts and communications, they would essentially be able to find out who all their international sources are, despite the fact that a journalist was completely complying with the law and just doing their job as they are allowed to under the First Amendment.”

Cameron highlighted his reporting about the government’s systemic noncompliance with the law when it comes to Section 702, noting that even the FISA court that oversees the program has cited the FBI for “persistent and widespread violations” in the past. Meanwhile, internal mechanisms intended to monitor the FBI and other agencies have been dismantled, Cameron said.

A lack of transparency and secret government interpretations of the law also make it difficult for journalists to report on it, and for lawmakers and the public to understand how Section 702 is being used.

Cameron noted his recent report for Wired on a letter from lawmakers, including Wyden, to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, asking her to clarify whether Americans using virtual private networks are vulnerable to spying under Section 702. It’s important to remember, Cameron said, that Section 702 is “being used in ways that we can’t really calculate, can’t understand, maybe never will.”

Dickas discussed Wyden’s efforts to protect Americans’ privacy and call attention to secret executive branch interpretations of Section 702 that have expanded the government’s surveillance power in the past. “Senator Wyden agrees that there is value to American’s national security in Section 702, but he’s also arguing pretty vociferously that it’s possible to make reforms to protect the privacy of Americans that do not diminish Section 702 national security value,” Dickas said.

A bill co-sponsored by Wyden and a bipartisan group of senators, the Government Surveillance Reform Act, would reauthorize Section 702 while also making urgently needed reforms to the law, Dickas explained.

Watch the full conversation here.

You can tell your lawmaker not to renew Section 702 without including privacy reforms for Americans using FPF’s action center.

You can tell Congress to close the data broker loophole and stop AI-powered mass surveillance here.

Prior restraints, or court orders prohibiting journalists from publishing news, are the “most serious” violations of the First Amendment, according to the Supreme Court. The Pentagon Papers case famously held that gagging the press is unconstitutional, even when the government claimed that The New York Times and The Washington Post reporting the secret history of its Vietnam War lies leaked by Daniel Ellsberg would damage national security.

But what if the Nixon administration had gone about it differently? Rather than seeking such an extreme judicial remedy, it could have had federal agents barge into the Times’ and Post’s newsrooms, seize the Pentagon Papers and all other national defense documents in the papers’ custody, whether from Ellsberg or another source entirely, and refuse to return any of them, claiming they’re all criminal “contraband” because the newspapers had violated the Espionage Act of 1917 by obtaining them.

There would have been no need for a prior restraint — no matter what your legal rights might be on paper, you can’t publish what you don’t possess. As one federal appellate court said in 2015, “The government need not ban a protected activity … if it can simply proceed upstream and dam the source.”

Over half a century after the Pentagon Papers, the federal government apparently believes it can do just that. In January, it raided the home of Post journalist Hannah Natanson, purportedly to investigate whether one of her alleged sources — government contractor Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones — broke the law by leaking documents to her.

Even a targeted operation would have been problematic enough — it violates federal law for the government to seize journalists’ materials to investigate their sources’ alleged crimes. That law, the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, arose from the seizure of a few pictures taken by reporters for The Stanford Daily of a confrontation between police and protesters.

That raid seems quaint now. In Natanson’s case, the government seized terabytes of data, most of which had nothing to do with that investigation. It’s claiming that it doesn’t have to return any classified information found in her files because it’s “contraband,” like drug money or illegal guns at a crime scene.

Although it hasn’t charged Natanson with a crime, the Department of Justice contends that she, along with her source, violated the Espionage Act by possessing classified documents (the Espionage Act is actually not even limited to classified records, since the classification system didn’t exist yet when it was enacted).

Next time federal prosecutors attempt their new censorship workaround, the judiciary needs to send a strong signal that news isn’t an ill-gotten gain.

Prosecutors also cited the alleged Espionage Act violation to excuse their noncompliance with the Privacy Protection Act, although they didn’t bother to share that reasoning with the judge until he called them out for their omission.

The Department of War (it’s earned the name at this point) has taken it even further, claiming it’s criminal solicitation not only for journalists to obtain leaked documents but to merely ask questions to Pentagon personnel who aren’t officially authorized to answer them.

District Judge Paul Friedman struck down the Pentagon’s press restrictions as unconstitutional March 20 in a lawsuit brought by the Times, but the Pentagon reissued them with hardly any substantive changes and promised to appeal the ruling against the original policy. Does that mean they think they can seize interview recordings from journalists, label them fruits of a forbidden tree, and keep them forever?

Of course, people should be outraged at the Trump administration for all of this. But, unfortunately, this contraband nonsense didn’t originate with Trump.

During the Biden administration, federal prosecutors floated a strikingly similar theory in the prosecution of Tim Burke, a Florida journalist, known for breaking the Manti Teʻo catfishing story back in 2013, who was charged with computer crimes for obtaining unaired outtakes of antisemitic rants by Ye (formerly Kanye West) during an interview with then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The most serious charges against Burke have been dismissed, but the government is appealing.

The government argued in Burke’s case, like in Natanson’s, that other materials having nothing to do with the investigation at hand could be permanently confiscated from Burke because they may constitute “contraband” from unspecified computer crimes. No judge has determined that any illegality occurred in either case, but both journalists have been restrained from pursuing countless stories because they simply don’t have their work.

In Natanson’s case, the notion that a journalist or publisher can violate the Espionage Act by obtaining government secrets in the first place is a red line that many administrations decided against crossing in prior decades. It was legitimized by the Biden administration’s extraction of a plea deal from WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange over his publication in 2010 of documents that exposed war crimes and abuses during the Iraq War, despite warnings from leading newspapers, law professors, and other First Amendment advocates.

And now that reasoning is apparently being extended to not just obtaining leaked documents but asking questions to anyone but a PR flack.

This contraband nonsense didn’t originate with Trump.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib has introduced an excellent bill to rein in Espionage Act abuses — named after Ellsberg, whose own prosecution was thrown out due to prosecutorial misconduct. And Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Becca Balint have new legislation to plug the holes in the Privacy Protection Act that allow illegal raids to slip through the cracks of the judicial system. But things are moving quickly. The bills are unlikely to advance before the administration does more damage.

The Pentagon Papers case stands for the proposition that the government cannot suppress the publication of truthful information of public concern, even when it would very much like to. The contraband theory is an attempt to achieve the suppression indirectly — by redefining journalists’ work product as something illicit that the government can confiscate.

Courts shouldn’t let it get that far. In the Natanson case, Judge William Porter in February rightly referred to the seizure of Natanson’s materials as a prior restraint. But he didn’t order them immediately returned, and he didn’t sanction federal prosecutors for making such absurd legal arguments (or for failing to disclose the Privacy Protection Act).

Next time federal prosecutors attempt their new censorship workaround, the judiciary needs to send a strong signal that news isn’t an ill-gotten gain and prior restraints in any form won’t be tolerated in this nation’s courthouses.

Judge Friedman will soon have the opportunity to do just that. The Times has filed a motion to compel the Pentagon to comply with his order to stop retaliating against journalists for doing their jobs, referring to the government’s conduct as “the definition of contempt.” Friedman should show the government the definition of sanctions.

A new bill introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Becca Balint could help end a troubling pattern of law enforcement officers getting permission from judges to search and seize a journalist’s materials without telling courts about a federal law designed to prevent exactly that.

The Privacy Protection Updates Act would provide some much-needed teeth to the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, a federal law that forbids the government from using search warrants in most cases to raid newsrooms or journalists’ homes, or seize their equipment. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) strongly endorses the bill.

Just a few months ago, the government raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home based on a search warrant that failed to mention the Privacy Protection Act. Although a judge later rebuked assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Kromberg for that omission, prosecutors and the government have faced few real consequences so far.

Natanson’s case is at least the sixth in recent years where authorities seeking a search warrant against a member of the press failed to inform the court about the act. In some past instances, they didn’t even tell the court that the target was a journalist.

A look back at these cases shows that unless Congress strengthens the Privacy Protection Act by passing Wyden and Balint’s new bill, the law will continue to fail the very journalists it is meant to protect.

Marion County Record

In 2023, police in Marion County, Kansas, raided the Marion County Record newsroom and the home of co-owners Eric and Joan Meyers. Officers did not alert the judge who signed off on the warrant to the Privacy Protection Act. Joan Meyers, who was 98, died the day after the raid on her house.

After the national backlash to the raid, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody claimed he knew about the act but argued that it doesn’t apply when journalists “are suspects in the offense that is the subject of the search.”

But because Cody never made that argument to the judge, a court never had the chance to evaluate it. If it had, it would have rejected it. The act’s “suspect exception” does not permit searches when the “offense” police are investigating consists of the “receipt, possession, communication, or withholding” of the material sought, which was precisely the case with the Record.

Prosecutors eventually withdrew the warrant, and the county later paid $3 million to settle lawsuits brought as a result of the search — but only after the damage was done.

Bryan Carmody

In 2019, San Francisco police searched journalist Bryan Carmody’s home, office, and phone records while trying to identify his confidential source. They did not tell the judges who authorized the search warrants about the Privacy Protection Act, or that Carmody was a journalist with a press pass issued by the police department.

As a result, Carmody awoke one morning to police using a sledgehammer to try to break down his door, before he was detained for hours and questioned by the FBI while the search was carried out.

All of the search warrants against Carmody were later ruled illegal, and the city paid him a $369,000 settlement and agreed to ensure its employees were aware of internal policies concerning warrants to journalists.

Indybay

Just five years later, however, the San Francisco Police Department again failed to disclose the Privacy Protection Act in a search warrant targeting the independent news outlet Indybay. It also didn’t mention California’s shield law, which also protects journalists from certain compelled disclosures.

Police obtained the search warrant to compel Indybay to turn over electronic information in an effort to identify the author of a post on its community-sourced newswire who claimed to have vandalized the San Francisco Police Credit Union, and it gagged Indybay from talking about it. With help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Indybay successfully fought off the demand.

Tim Burke

The FBI raided the home office of journalist Tim Burke in 2023 as part of a criminal investigation into alleged computer crimes, after news outlets posted outtakes from a Fox News interview showing recording artist Ye, formerly Kanye West, making antisemitic comments. Burke has since been charged with federal crimes for accessing the outtakes, which he shared with news outlets. Burke denies the charges.

The government obtained a search warrant for the raid, but in its warrant application described Burke as a media consultant, not a journalist. It also never informed the court that the Privacy Protection Act arguably applied to the search, or of any exceptions to the law on which the government relied.

Burke objected to the search for its failure to disclose his status as a reporter and omission of the PPA, as well as on other grounds, and asked for evidence seized from the raid to be suppressed. A federal court rejected his motion, however, noting that even if the act applied, the remedy for violations of the law did not include suppression of evidence.

Pablo Unzueta, Julianna Lacoste, and Hugo Padilla

In 2020, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department obtained search warrants for the devices of two journalists, Pablo Unzueta and Julianna Lacoste, and one livestreamer, Hugo Padilla. The three were arrested while covering a protest, and all three were identifiable as members of the press by markings on their clothing or their press credentials.

When seeking the search warrants, police did not tell the court that the three were journalists or engaged in dissemination of information to the public, according to records unsealed after a court battle led by the First Amendment Coalition. Police also did not mention the Privacy Protection Act or the California shield law.

A later lawsuit by Unzueta resulted in a $90,000 settlement.

The Wyden-Balint measure can help fix the law

The government’s repeated failure to tell courts the full story when seeking search warrants against journalists or others engaged in the dissemination of information to the public shows just how necessary the Privacy Protection Act Updates Act is.

The new bill would help fix these problems by requiring the government to explicitly disclose and prove the exceptions to the law it wants to rely on to justify a search warrant to courts. Courts must also ensure that those exceptions are applied consistently with the First Amendment. These are extremely important changes that should prohibit a repeat of the Natanson case.

The bill would also provide that any evidence obtained in violation of the Privacy Protection Act cannot be used in any investigation, court proceeding, or other official proceedings. This exclusionary rule is a stronger deterrent than the act’s current remedy, which allows only for monetary damages when the law is violated.

Finally, the bill would ensure that the government can’t sidestep its protections when it targets information stored in the cloud by journalists and others who disseminate information to the public.

With these fixes, Congress can ensure that the Privacy Protection Act effectively prohibits search warrants targeting journalists, a protection that is needed now more than ever. Judges can’t enforce a law they don’t know applies, and a free press can’t function if reporters fear surprise raids on their newsrooms and homes.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

A new bill would put some bite behind the federal law that’s supposed to protect journalists from search warrants. Tell your member of Congress to support it, and while you’re at it, tell them to pass the Daniel Ellsberg Act, too. Then keep reading for more press freedom news, including the latest on how petty Pete Hegseth is recycling old ideas to stifle the Pentagon press corps.

Tell Congress to stop newsroom raids

Just a few months ago, the government raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home based on a search warrant that failed to mention the Privacy Protection Act, the federal law that’s supposed to stop most search warrants targeting journalists.

Natanson’s case isn’t the only one involving a journalist where the government has conveniently omitted the law. A new bill introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Becca Balint could help end this troubling pattern.

The Wyden-Balint bill is needed now more than ever, and Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is proud to endorse it. Read about why the bill is necessary and tell your member of Congress to support it today.

• Take action

Meet the new Pentagon press policy, same as the old Pentagon press policy

After a federal judge struck down the Pentagon’s media access policy last week in litigation brought by The New York Times, the Defense Department enacted a new policy that retains the same core constitutional problem as the original one — it allows the government to deny reporters press passes merely for asking questions. The Times has moved to compel the Pentagon to follow the judge’s ruling, calling its conduct “the definition of contempt.”

We said in a statement, “It’s past time that this administration, its officials, and its lawyers start facing real consequences for ignoring court orders and the Constitution.”

• Read our statement

Pentagon claims asking questions is a crime

In 2017, rogue police officers in Laredo, Texas, arrested citizen journalist Priscilla Villarreal for asking government officials questions. They were rightly ridiculed, although the Supreme Court this week declined to review an awful ruling preventing Villarreal from suing them. But they were also apparently ahead of their time.

As FPF Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern explained in The Intercept, it’s now the federal government’s position that asking “unauthorized” questions is illegal. Court filings imply that the Pentagon believes journalists who ask unauthorized questions are not only subject to revocation of press passes, but to criminal prosecution.

• Read the article

FOIA sets a floor for transparency, not a ceiling

Our Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy, Lauren Harper, wrote for MS Now about the Pentagon’s insulting justification for its restrictions on newsgathering: That journalists have “legitimate” alternatives, like Freedom of Information Act requests.

As Harper explains, FOIA is broken across the government, but especially at the Pentagon, and even more so during this administration. Even when it’s working, the law is intended to guarantee a minimum level of transparency, not be an exclusive means of obtaining news.

• Read more

Government thinks First Amendment isn’t for immigrant journalists

The government made an alarming claim in response to Nashville journalist Estefany Rodríguez’s contention that her immigration arrest was in retaliation for exercising her First Amendment rights: That she doesn’t have any.

FPF Senior Adviser Caitlin Vogus explains that the reason that sounds so obviously wrong is because it is.

• Read more

Watch our recent events

We participated in two important discussions this week, and you can check out both online if you missed them. Harper moderated a panel hosted by the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy on the Trump administration’s escalating attacks against press freedom. And FPF hosted a conversation about current efforts to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without reforms to prevent illegal surveillance of communications by Americans, including journalists.

You can also use our action center to tell Congress not to renew Section 702 without reforms. And you can find the rest of our panel discussions, as well as our short videos about press freedom topics in the news, on our YouTube page.

• Watch more

“Any Republican official who is vocal about Biden’s jawboning but silent now is someone who probably doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously when it comes to principled application of the First Amendment,” Stern said.

“They have no interest in journalism,” Swisher said, “I’m not working for you hacks.” Paramount will tank CNN to appease Trump, just like it did CBS. Its shareholders should be objecting loudly to further public humiliation and devaluation.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies ignore press rights, editors, unions, and lawyers must be willing to step up to support journalists, FPF’s Deputy Director of Advocacy Adam Rose explained. “If you’re prevented from telling the story, then you are the story,” he said.

Maybe station owners who didn’t want to rock the boat when Trump and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to censor the news will grow a spine now that they’re messing with real money.

Estefany Rodríguez’s First Amendment case may be just getting started, but it’s already revealing how far the government will go to stifle journalism and speech it finds inconvenient.

The Nashville journalist, originally from Colombia but with authorization to work here, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 4 and released on bond last week. Rodríguez argued her detention was in retaliation for her work as a journalist, in violation of the First Amendment.

In response, the government has taken an extreme position that could have impacts far beyond Rodríguez’s case. In a recent court filing, it suggested that Rodríguez — and anyone the government asserts is an “unlawful alien” — does not have any First Amendment rights at all.

This appears to mark the first time that the Trump administration has argued that a journalist who it claims is living in the United States illegally has no First Amendment rights. Even as it has argued against First Amendment claims made by Mario Guevara and Ya’akub Vijandre, the government did not claim that the First Amendment didn’t apply because of their immigration status.

The government also hasn’t taken that position in cases involving noncitizens who are lawfully present in the United States, like those of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, since Supreme Court and other legal precedent is clear that the First Amendment protects them. Rather, the government argued that immigration law gave it the power to deport Khalil and Öztürk, and that courts don’t have the authority to review First Amendment claims in the context of immigration proceedings.

That’s still wrong, but it’s different from saying that the First Amendment doesn’t protect someone in the U.S. at all because they’re living in the country illegally. If the First Amendment doesn’t apply to a person who is in the country without legal permission, the government wouldn’t just be able to deport them for their speech. It would theoretically be free to jail them for writing a news article or a book or for speaking critically about the government or its policies to the press.

If that sounds obviously wrong, that’s because it is.

Here’s another absurd twist on the government’s argument: The First Amendment also protects free exercise of religion. If those lacking legal status have no First Amendment rights, the government could forbid them from exercising their religion or require them to follow a particular religion.

That can’t be right. The First Amendment, which restricts the government’s power to restrict speech or religious exercise, shouldn’t depend on whether the person speaking or worshiping has legal status or not.

Legal experts agree that, as a general matter, constitutional rights apply to those living illegally in the United States on the basis of their personhood and presence here. The Supreme Court has also explicitly held that certain constitutional rights apply to immigrants in the country without legal permission, including the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law and the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process.

The government’s argument is inconsistent with that precedent. It would stifle speech from many immigrants who have built lives and developed strong ties to the United States, including those who may believe they have the legal right to be here. Rodríguez, for instance, entered the country legally and had authorization to work here, yet the government claims it can silence her by declaring her an “illegal alien.”

But the government’s interpretation of the First Amendment wouldn’t just harm people like Rodríguez. It’s bad for Americans, too.

Immigrants to the U.S. who the government says lack legal status but who hold valid work permits that allow them to work as journalists, like Rodríguez, can report important news stories about immigration enforcement because they are part of the community being targeted. Book authors here without legal status have written firsthand accounts about the immigrant experience. Sources lacking legal status have told American journalists about deplorable conditions at detention facilities and Kafkaesque immigration proceedings.

All of this speech is invaluable for informing public understanding and debate over immigration policy. Saying that these people have no First Amendment rights means that Americans will be far less likely to hear from them and thus less knowledgeable.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the government has argued that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to those lacking permanent legal status in the United States.

In 2015, the Department of Justice (under President Obama) argued that a group of mothers in the country without legal permission who protested while in immigration detention couldn’t bring a First Amendment claim because, as “non-resident aliens” who did not have established connections to the U.S., they had no First Amendment rights.

But because the case was later voluntarily dismissed, the government’s theory was never tested in court. The government seemed to have abandoned that argument by not raising it again — until now.

The government’s signal in the Rodríguez case that it’s reviving this argument should alarm everyone. So should its continued efforts to deport Rodríguez, which you can and should speak out against.

The First Amendment was written to limit government power, not let officials decide whose voices are worth hearing. Targeting people because of their legal status and declaring them outside the First Amendment targets every American’s right to know the truth.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

New York, March 24, 2026 — After a federal judge struck down the Pentagon’s media access policy last week, the Defense Department enacted a new policy that retains the same core constitutional problem as the original one — it allows the government to punish the press for asking questions.

The following can be attributed to Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern:

“As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, journalists are entitled to publish what their sources tell them. If the Pentagon has a constitutional basis to restrict what its employees tell the press, that’s a matter between the Pentagon and its employees. The press doesn’t work for the government and any policy that purports to require the press to help the government keep secrets from the American public is unconstitutional. The revised policy does exactly that by threatening to revoke journalists’ access if they publish information obtained through ‘unauthorized’ disclosures. The closure of the workspace for the press further demonstrates the government’s censorial and retributive motives.

“We were pleased to hear that The New York Times is headed back to court to enforce the judge’s ruling and we hope the judge is not generous with second chances. The revised policy is not a good faith effort to comply with Judge Friedman’s order. It adds mostly meaningless window dressing while retaining the core constitutional violation — subjecting journalists to punishment for doing their jobs. Noncompliance with judicial orders is punishable through monetary sanctions, attorney disciplinary referrals, and contempt of court, including imprisonment pending compliance. It’s past time that this administration, its officials, and its lawyers start facing real consequences for ignoring court orders and the Constitution.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

A judge today ruled in favor of The New York Times in its challenge to the Trump administration’s unconstitutional policy restricting journalists’ access to the Pentagon unless they agree not to publish information that officials don’t authorize for release.

The following can be attributed to Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):

“The judge was right to see the Pentagon’s outrageous censorship for what it is, but this wasn’t exactly a close call. If the same issue was presented as a hypothetical question on a first-year law school exam, the professor would be criticized for making the test too easy. It’s shocking that this sweeping prior restraint was the official policy of our federal government and that Department of Justice lawyers had the nerve to argue that journalists asking questions of the government is criminal.

“Fifty years ago, the Supreme Court called prior restraints on the press ‘the most serious and the least tolerable’ of First Amendment violations. At the time, the court was talking about relatively targeted orders restraining specific reporting because of a specific alleged threat — like in the Pentagon Papers case, where the government falsely claimed that the documents about the Vietnam War leaked by Daniel Ellsberg threatened national security. Courts back then could never have anticipated the government broadly restraining all reporting that it doesn’t authorize without any justification beyond hypothetical speculation.

“It’s unfortunate that it took this long for the Pentagon’s ridiculous policy to be thrown in the trash. Especially now that we are spending money and blood on yet another war based on constantly shifting pretexts, journalists should double down on their commitment to finding out what the Pentagon does not want the public to know rather than parroting ‘authorized’ narratives.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Estefany Rodríguez is free on bond, thanks to her lawyers and support from press freedom supporters like you. While we celebrate Rodríguez’s release, the government’s effort to deport her continues (you can speak out against it using our action center), and new threats to wartime reporting and Americans’ privacy are closing in. Read the latest on how you can protect the free press.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr seeks Iran-style media obedience

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is again openly abusing his power, this time to attack news outlets that displeased President Donald Trump with their reporting on the war in Iran.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Senior Adviser Caitlin Vogus wrote in The Guardian this week about how Trump and Carr apparently want a press that operates more like that in Iran: largely obedient, state-run broadcasters that air propaganda praising a supreme leader and his wars. Newsrooms, lawmakers, and the public must push back. We also discussed Carr’s unconstitutional antics on MeidasTouch’s Legal AF podcast.

• Read the op-ed

Tell Congress: Reform Section 702

Next week, the House of Representatives is expected to vote to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without making any changes to rein in the government’s power to spy on Americans without a warrant.

Section 702’s mass warrantless surveillance authority has a long history of abuse, including against journalists. Congress should not renew the law without significant reforms that will protect journalists and all Americans.

Use our action center to tell lawmakers not to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA without key privacy changes.

• Take action

Trump’s massive, secret government database

FPF Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper wrote in The Intercept this week about how the Trump administration is on its way to creating every authoritarian’s dream: A centralized database containing intimate details about every resident of this country.

Agencies are reportedly pooling vast amounts of people’s personal data to create a powerful tool that would empower the government to conduct previously unimagined levels of surveillance and harassment.

The public deserves to fully understand just how badly Americans’ data and privacy have been compromised. That’s why FPF is suing for documents behind the database.

• Read the article

Attorney discipline boards must step up

The D.C. Bar’s decision to initiate disciplinary proceedings against disgraced Department of Justice lawyer Ed Martin has been viewed by some as a triumph for the rule of law. Not so fast, we say.

Don’t get us wrong — Martin should be disbarred. But he can’t be the sole sacrificial lamb. There have been plenty of well-founded complaints against Trump administration lawyers filed in Washington and elsewhere, but few go anywhere.

FPF’s Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern wrote about disciplinary complaints filed by us and others against government officials and lawyers whose conduct threatens First Amendment rights. Hopefully, the Martin investigation is the start of attorney discipline boards showing some backbone.

• Read the article

Two new must-reads on free speech and digital freedoms

Two of the biggest names in digital rights have just dropped must-read books.

In “Transaction Denied,” FPF board President Rainey Reitman writes about the shadow world of financial censorship, examining how banks and payment intermediaries shape and censor speech, and gives her firsthand account of co-founding FPF. A portion of every book sale goes to support our work.

In “Privacy Defender,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director (and longtime FPF legal counsel) Cindy Cohn dives into her 30-year fight against electronic surveillance. Buy your copy today to learn about — and help protect — digital rights.

A great way to deal with Freedom of Information Act stonewalling: Report the news you can and explain why the government’s bad faith stopped you from reporting more.

Denying a media request because a ranger would need to speak Spanish — under the guise of “English is the official language of the U.S.” — is both wrong and plain dumb. Ojalá que no vengan con esas pendejadas la próxima vez.

The Ellisons are “willing to throw the economic interests of their news holdings under the bus if it boosts their other business before the Trump administration,” FPF’s Stern explained.

Good news: Gov. Larry Rhoden signed into law a bill protecting South Dakotans from strategic lawsuits against public participation. Red, blue, and purple states know there’s nothing partisan about protecting against anti-speech lawfare.

The Trump administration undoubtedly knows that missing and inconsistent immigration data makes it harder for journalists to fact check government lies and inconsistencies.

• Donate to FPF

Upcoming events

Join us at the events below; click on the flyers for more information, including on how to register.

FPF is proud to co-host the opening screening of “Steal This Story, Please!” — a documentary on journalist Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! FPF Executive Director Trevor Timm will deliver opening remarks, followed by a Q&A with Goodman and Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin.

Get your tickets today: Use code GOODMAN-15 for a $15 ticket.

Last June, Washington’s D.C. Bar members said “not on our watch.” They overwhelmingly rejected Brad Bondi, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, in his campaign for the bar’s presidency. Many feared Bondi would defang the bar’s disciplinary board (which he would not have directly controlled), so his defeat was framed as a triumph for the rule of law.

Some might see this week’s news that the D.C. Bar initiated disciplinary proceedings against disgraced Department of Justice lawyer Ed Martin as validating that sentiment. I’m not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong — Martin should be disbarred. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) partnered with Demand Progress on a complaint last May over his ridiculous threats against people who criticized the Trump administration — including when an article in Wired identified inexperienced employees at the Department of Government Efficiency.

But Martin can’t be the sole sacrificial lamb. If investigations are reserved for attorneys as brazenly lawless as him, that’s quite a low bar (pun intended). There have been plenty of well-founded complaints against Trump administration lawyers filed in Washington and elsewhere since Bondi’s loss. Few go anywhere.

The need to act is clear. A November study found that dozens of courts have called out government lawyers for misrepresentations. Judges are (finally) threatening them with contempt for their antics, but the courage hasn’t spread to disciplinary offices, which have the power to disbar and suspend lawyers.

For example, a disciplinary complaint from FPF against Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr last July detailed Carr’s assistance to President Donald Trump, whose gilded face he wears as a lapel pin, in laundering an alleged bribe through the courts. Carr stalled CBS parent Paramount’s merger with Skydance, finally approving it two days after Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle his frivolous lawsuit over an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

Hopefully, the Martin investigation is the start of attorney discipline boards showing some backbone.

The D.C. Bar’s December letter dismissing the complaint said the allegations “do not align with the language of those Rules and how they have been applied” by appellate courts, also noting supposed ambiguity in First Amendment law governing broadcasters.

It’s no surprise that there is no precedent specifically prohibiting FCC chairs from helping presidents extort licensees with frivolous lawsuits. The rules are broad because unethical antics are unpredictable. One prohibits “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.” Another restricts “Conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.” The First Amendment has nothing to do with the impropriety of facilitating bribery.

The D.C. Bar is not the only one reluctant to stick its neck out. Maryland’s Attorney Grievance Commission ducked another complaint against Carr, from the Campaign for Accountability, about his infamous “easy way or the hard way” ultimatum to pressure Disney to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. Its rules, it said, allow (but don’t require) it to dismiss complaints that aren’t based on firsthand knowledge. It’s not like they were being asked to investigate rumors — Carr’s threat was on a recorded podcast — but they saw an opening to shrivel away and shrank through it.

Virginia’s state bar has joined its cowardly comrades around the Beltway. Last month, federal Judge William B. Porter chewed out prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg for omitting the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — which restricts seizures of newsgathering materials — from his warrant application for the January raid of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. Many experts believe the Natanson raid violated the act, and Porter said he may not have authorized it had the law been disclosed.

The DOJ’s stunt backs disciplinary offices into a corner — if they shy away from actionable complaints, they look like capitulators.

Before Porter gave Kromberg a piece of his mind, FPF filed an ethics complaint against him in Virginia, where he is licensed, about the omission. But the disciplinary board said it’s up to judges to decide whether attorneys have misrepresented the law — a perplexing position when the rules the board enforces expressly obligate lawyers to disclose authority that is adverse to their positions. Virginia cited a similar cop-out to not investigate embattled ex-prosecutor Lindsey Halligan. It’s reminiscent of Florida’s bar concocting a policy of not investigating federal officials to avoid investigating Attorney General Bondi.

We resubmitted the complaint about Kromberg after the judge made his position clear. Crickets.

Yet despite the inaction, the administration sees disciplinary offices as threats (or scapegoats). Last week, it proposed a rule empowering itself to “request” state bars suspend probes of prosecutors so the DOJ can investigate first, presumably from behind its giant North Korea-esque Trump banner. It says it “shall take appropriate action” if requests are ignored.

The proposal is nonsensical. The DOJ can already “request” state bars’ deference, just like I can call Domino’s and “request” free pizza, but there is no “appropriate action” either of us can take to get our way. Federal law says government attorneys are subject to state rules. Ironically, the proposal is so absurd that a lawyer defending it might violate their ethical obligations.

But the DOJ’s stunt nonetheless backs disciplinary offices into a corner — if they shy away from actionable complaints, they look like capitulators, just like the law firms that humiliated themselves by buckling to Trump.

Hopefully, the Martin investigation is the start of attorney discipline boards showing some backbone. We’ll see. FPF filed another complaint last month, with New York’s Attorney Grievance Committee, about government lawyer Sean Skedzielewski’s claims to a federal judge in Chicago that riots by “violent terrorist organizations” justified Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rampage against the First Amendment.

As with regulators facilitating presidential shakedowns, no one ever thought to write a rule prohibiting government lawyers from fabricating terrorist invasions. The easy way out is there for the taking.

Government officials have discovered a new tactic for attacking reporting they don’t like: They just call it “doxxing.”

At the federal, state, and local levels, authorities are increasingly stretching the term doxxing beyond recognition to threaten journalists who report about immigration enforcement, potential misconduct by elected and appointed officials, and military actions.

Unfortunately, this reframing of routine journalism as doxxing works all too often exactly as intended, chilling reporting and leaving the public less informed.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) recently spoke to four reporters who have firsthand experience facing accusations of doxxing based on their reporting, along with the harassment and legal threats that often followed. We discussed how this tactic works, and how journalists and others can fight back.

“Framing people who are in positions of, frankly, incredible power in the government — which we all pay taxes to and all deserve transparency from — as victims of doxxing for just naming what their roles are and what they’re supposedly doing is a great way to continue to demonize media,” Vittoria Elliott, a reporter for Wired, explained.

Elliott described how she was harassed online and faced legal threats from the Department of Justice after her reporting about the young engineers who held power at DOGE.

Elliott urged news media companies to recognize that journalists now report in an environment where the government is actively attempting to criminalize certain elements of their work. Journalists and media organizations must be “clear eyed” about the risks, she said, and explain the process of journalism to the public, while also doing more to “prepare for the fact that elements of our jobs are going to be recategorized as criminal activity.”

Doug Sovern, a former investigative reporter and political reporter for San Francisco’s KCBS radio, agreed that the “doxxing” label is a tactic of demonization, adding that government officials “also know that some media will back down” when faced with even spurious accusations of doxxing.

After the Federal Communications Commission threatened the license of KCBS for reporting on an immigration raid that happened in public, the station’s corporate owner “started basically spiking interviews,” Sovern said, “out of fear of more reprisal or antagonizing the Trump administration.”

“There’s been no loss of license. Nothing’s happened,” Sovern added. “But there was so much fear on the part of our corporation and their bottom line that it really had a chilling effect on everything we were doing in the political space.”

Gregory Royal Pratt, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, spoke about the harassment and threats he faced after a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson condemned him for reporting on a public immigration raid in Chicago. He echoed Elliott and Sovern, explaining that doxxing accusations are “clearly a very deliberate thing meant to intimidate me out of reporting.”

“At least for a moment I thought about it,” Pratt added, “Then it’s like, ‘All right, let’s get back to work.’”

Pratt also hailed as “American heroes” the ordinary people who record immigration agents in public and are themselves often accused of doxxing. “People recording and documenting history as it happens, without interfering, without being violent,” he said, “is really, really important.” He added that journalists and the public “would not be getting the truth out of the federal government without it.”

Charlie Kratovil, the founder and editor of New Brunswick Today, described his legal challenge to Daniel’s Law in New Jersey, which ultimately resulted in a loss before the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Under the law, which prohibits the publication of certain information about government or law enforcement officials, “We’ve seen governments wholesale just remove all kinds of records from the internet that used to be public, whether it’s property records, financial disclosure statements — and for people who are not police, not law enforcement, not judges,” Kratovil said. “The seemingly endless expansion of this is only going to lead to more corruption and more crime and people getting away with it,” he added.

Watch the whole event here.

If you’re a journalist facing online harassment as a result of your reporting, check out Freedom of the Press Foundation’s resource page on preparing for online harassment or request a training with our Digital Security Training team.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Another journalist, Estefany Rodríguez, sits in Immigration and Customs Enforcement lockup amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on press freedom. Read on for more about how you can help free Rodríguez and support a new bill to reform the Espionage Act.

Tell Congress to protect journalists and whistleblowers

This week, Rep. Rashida Tlaib introduced the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act to reform the archaic Espionage Act and stop prosecutors from treating reporters and their sources like spies. We’re honored that the bill is named after our late co-founder, Ellsberg, the legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower and former Espionage Act defendant.

For decades, the Espionage Act has been used to chill national security reporting. The first Trump administration used it to charge WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — a prosecution that shamefully continued under President Joe Biden. Now, the Trump administration is arguing that journalists violate the law when they report government secrets.

Use our new action center to tell your members of Congress to support the Ellsberg Act.

• Write to Congress here

Watch our online event introducing the Ellsberg Act

We also co-hosted an online event announcing the bill featuring Tlaib, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Executive Director Trevor Timm, FPF’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper, Ellsberg’s son Robert Ellsberg, and Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip Gibbons.

• Watch it on YouTube

Free Estefany Rodríguez from ICE

Nashville, Tennessee, journalist Estefany Rodríguez was arrested by federal immigration agents on flimsy “gotcha” charges last week. Her lawyers say she was targeted because she reported critically about the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

It wouldn’t surprise us, given the administration’s horrendous record of targeting immigrants over constitutionally protected speech. Needless arrests of noncitizen journalists silence the very reporters best positioned to cover ICE’s impact on their communities.

Use our action center to tell lawmakers to help free Rodríguez.

• Write to Congress here

The Oscars in solitary confinement

Footage captured by Raoul Poole, Robert Earl Council, and Melvin Ray using contraband cell phones to circumvent prison censorship is the centerpiece of HBO’s “The Alabama Solution,” which is up for an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature this weekend.

But while the academy deliberated, the three individuals who made the film possible sat in extreme solitary confinement.

FPF Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern, along with incarcerated journalist and FPF columnist Jeremy Busby and Corinne Shanahan of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, wrote for Inquest that “the United States may sometimes protect those who expose tyranny abroad (at least when the tyrants are geopolitical adversaries), but those who shine a light on abuses back home are on their own.”

• Read more

Judge’s rebuke of DOJ in journalist raid case exposes bigger problem

A judge who approved the search warrant for the raid of Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson’s home has recently chastised prosecutors for failing to tell him about a federal law that limits such raids, the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.

But Judge William Porter’s rebuke sparked a debate: Isn’t it the judge’s job to know the law himself? FPF Senior Adviser Caitlin Vogus explains that the answer is more complicated than it may seem.

• Read more

Appeals court picks the wrong constitutional emergency

A federal appeals court last week vacated an order from an already dismissed lawsuit that had limited the Department of Homeland Security’s tactics against journalists and protesters in the Chicago area.

Stern wrote for the Chicago Tribune that if appellate courts are looking for rulings to vacate unasked, they should focus on those that facilitate censorship and impunity, rather than those that restrain tear gas and rubber bullets.

• Read the op-ed

Filming federal agents in the field

Most guidance for journalists on filming federal agents — which can be deadly these days — is aimed at those in newsrooms with resources. Yet many independent and freelance journalists are working on the ground right now without such institutional support.

Our digital security team spoke with two such independent journalists about how they approach filming federal officers.

• Read more here

The department’s retaliation against Freedom of Information Act officers for making lawful releases is a blatant abuse of power.

Are we supposed to believe Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when he says he restricts press access for national security? Hegseth only cares about his own image, and all of his censorship should be taken in that context.

The government’s claims in the Lemon and Fort cases that prosecutors are “the arbiters of journalistic practice” is deeply chilling, as Joel Simon writes.

FPF filed this complaint because fabricating a violent terrorist invasion of an American city to justify suppressing First Amendment rights is “an effort to subvert the rule of law,” Stern explains.

A judge who approved the search warrant that led to a raid on journalist Hannah Natanson’s home has recently chastised prosecutors for failing to tell him about a federal law that limits such raids. Judge William B. Porter said that prosecutors should have informed him about the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, a law that forbids almost all search warrants targeting journalists.

But Porter’s rebuke sparked a debate: Isn’t it the judge’s job to know the law himself?

The answer is more complicated than it may seem at first. It’s true that we generally expect judges to know the law, and they have law clerks who help them research relevant statutes and precedents. But judges and their staffs are human, and the legal system is designed with that in mind. Our adversarial system, with prosecutors and defense attorneys on opposite sides, encourages lawyers to make sure a judge knows about the facts or law that helps their case or harms their opponent.

Sometimes, however, that system breaks down or isn’t followed. For example, when the government applies for a search warrant, there is no opposing side. Only prosecutors and law enforcement officers make their case to a judge. The person targeted by the search warrant doesn’t even know about it, let alone get a chance to oppose it.

In those situations, we rely not only on the judge’s acumen but also attorneys’ ethical obligations. Attorneys have an ethical duty to inform the court of any relevant law, even if it hurts their case. They can argue that the law doesn’t apply, but they can’t pretend it doesn’t exist. Prosecutors, in particular, are also supposed to seek justice, not just win cases.

That didn’t happen in the Natanson case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon D. Kromberg knew about the Privacy Protection Act but chose not to mention it in the government’s request for a search warrant targeting Natanson’s home and devices, part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of leaking to the press.

Kromberg told Porter the omission was because of Department of Justice memos that said that the act didn’t apply in circumstances like Natanson’s, “when there was a reason to believe that the individual who maintained the information was involved in the offense.” But the decision of whether the act applied or barred the search warrant was one for the court to make, not prosecutors.

It’s deeply alarming to have DOJ lawyers decide they don’t have to tell judges about the Privacy Protection Act when they’ve unilaterally decided it doesn’t apply because a reporter is “involved” in a crime. For one thing, the DOJ’s determination that Natanson was “involved” in an offense because she allegedly received classified documents from a source relies on a deeply controversial reading of criminal law. For another, failing to mention the act also makes it more likely courts will simply overlook it.

It’s deeply alarming to have DOJ lawyers decide they don’t have to tell judges about the Privacy Protection Act when they’ve unilaterally decided it doesn’t apply.

That’s because the Privacy Protection Act is a little-known law that most judges have probably never heard of. After all, the government doesn’t apply for a search warrant to raid newsrooms or journalists’ homes every day (though it does it more often than it should, and judges’ apparent ignorance of the act suggests a real need for more judicial training).

But unless something changes, real accountability for following such an unethical policy may be elusive. We filed an ethics complaint with the Virginia State Bar, arguing that Kromberg violated his ethical duties by failing to disclose the law to the court in the Natanson case. The bar punted on the complaint, saying it was a matter for the court to handle. We resubmitted the complaint after Porter’s remarks, but have not yet heard back.

Meanwhile, the DOJ is trying to make it harder for state bars to investigate federal prosecutors at all. Porter’s admonishment of Kromberg, while embarrassing, is hardly a strong deterrent toward future omissions.

Even worse, the government may still get the information it wanted from Natanson as a result of a raid that never should have happened in the first place. While Porter refused to allow the DOJ to search Natanson’s seized materials, he decided instead to search them himself. After his search, Porter will give prosecutors anything he finds that’s relevant to their leak investigation.

The DOJ has also demanded that the court turn over any classified material found on Natanson’s devices, whether it relates to the original leak investigation or not, and it’s appealing Porter’s ruling restricting its ability to conduct its own search.

In the end, then, the DOJ may get most of what it wants and suffer nothing more than a public scolding. That sends a terrible message. If prosecutors believe they can sidestep the Privacy Protection Act without consequence, then its protections become largely meaningless. Although journalists can file lawsuits to recover damages for violations of the act, even that apparently operates as very little deterrent.

The solution is to create consequences that matter. Congress should investigate whether the DOJ is operating under a formal or informal policy that tells prosecutors to omit or downplay the Privacy Protection Act in search warrant applications. Judges must be better trained on the act and start enforcing lawyers’ ethical duties with sanctions and other real consequences, not just finger-wagging. State bar associations must do their jobs and actually enforce ethical standards when prosecutors cross the line.

Without these reforms, the next time a journalist’s home or newsroom is raided, it won’t be an oversight or a mistake. It will be the new normal for press freedom in America.