Freedom of the Press

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Rümeysa Öztürk has now been facing deportation for 311 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on. Read on for more of the week’s press freedom stories.

Arrests of journalists Don Lemon, Georgia Fort send unmistakable message

Federal agents arrested journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort on charges related to their news coverage of a Jan. 18 protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, in an outrageous attack on freedom of the press.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said, “These arrests, under bogus legal theories for obviously constitutionally protected reporting, are clear warning shots aimed at other journalists. The unmistakable message is that journalists must tread cautiously because the government is looking for any way to target them.”

“We’ve recently seen that even in the Trump era, public pressure still can work,” Stern added. “It’s time to do it again. News outlets across the political spectrum need to loudly defend Lemon’s and Fort’s rights.”

• Read the statement

Alex Pretti’s murder was an attack on press freedom

The murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota once again show the power of cellphone footage in combating official lies. Solely because footage was so clear that even the Trump administration knew its story wasn’t credible, the party line shifted within hours of Pretti’s shooting from comments about a “terrorist” planning a “massacre” to something akin to “jaywalking is now a capital offense.”

These days, cellphone videographers are a vital part of the news ecosystem, serving as crucial source material for reporters. FPF’s Stern writes about how shooting, killing, censoring, and other targeting of individuals filming news as it unfolds is an attack on press freedom (and an offense against all else that’s good in the world).

• Read more here

Whistleblower Guan Heng granted asylum

A judge on Wednesday granted asylum to Guan Heng, a whistleblower who secretly filmed Uyghur internment camps in China and shared his footage online after arriving in the United States. His footage became crucial evidence for journalists reporting on the camps, including the team at BuzzFeed News that won a Pulitzer Prize.

We said in a statement that those who spoke out against Guan’s deportation case “should carry that momentum to other fronts in the very active battles for the rights of whistleblowers, journalists, and people who film government wrongdoing, whether in China or Minneapolis.” And we called on the Department of Homeland Security to “give serious thought to why an immigration crackdown supposedly intended to target the worst of the worst is endangering the best of the best.”

• Read the statement

Las Vegas judge doubles down on prior restraints

District Judge Jessica Peterson managed a remarkable feat: Violating the same bedrock First Amendment principles twice in just over a week.

First, on Jan. 13, Peterson issued a sweeping “decorum order” unconstitutionally restricting what journalists could publish about a sexual assault trial. She walked that back after a letter from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but, eight days later, kicked the paper’s journalists out of court for not agreeing to her censorial demands.

The Nevada Supreme Court quickly struck down the second illegal order on Wednesday. Peterson could have saved herself some embarrassment if she’d changed course after reading Stern’s op-ed earlier in the week — or better yet, if she’d read the FIrst Amendment.

• Read the op-ed

Unpaywalled reporting informed Chicago during ICE invasion

FPF founding board member and native Chicagoan John Cusack wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times about how the city benefited during the Operation Midway Blitz immigration enforcement crackdown from unpaywalled reporting by Chicago Public Media (which owns the Chicago Sun-Times), the Chicago Reader, Unraveled Press, The Triibe, Block Club Chicago, and others.

In other places, though, paywalls “create a two-tiered citizenry — one that can afford to be informed and one that cannot. Those most likely to be surveilled, policed, detained and deported are least able to afford subscriptions.”

His op-ed highlighted FPF’s event last October featuring fellow FPF board member Katie Drummond of Wired and Joseph Cox of 404 Media discussing the business benefits those outlets experienced after unpaywalling.

• Read it here

What we're reading One year into President Trump’s second administration, press freedoms are under attack WFAE

FPF Executive Director Trevor Timm explained how attacks on press freedom are growing. Timm’s greatest concern, he added, is that the government may soon cross the Rubicon of “actually prosecuting journalists for doing their job.”

NY Times Magazine writer subpoenaed over article in federal trial U.S. Press Freedom Tracker

The court should reject prosecutors’ demand that Jeffrey Toobin testify about his reporting. Forcing journalists to testify about their newsgathering chills reporting and undermines the First Amendment.

The best weapon you have in the fight against ICE The New York Times

Cellphone footage is an incredibly important source of accountability. Government attacks on those who document the news, whether journalists or not, are attacks on the First Amendment.

Illinois law shielding officials’ personal information amid political violence sparks transparency backlash Chicago Tribune

A new Illinois law that allows public officials to shield their personal information from the public is “basically a sledgehammer” allowing politicians to carry out censorship, FPF Senior Adviser Caitlin Vogus explained.

RSVP here: freedom.press/covering-immigration.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

New York, Jan. 30, 2026 — Federal agents have arrested journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort on charges related to their news coverage of a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Jan. 18.

The Trump administration had previously tried to criminally charge Lemon, and it lost.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said:

“The government’s arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are naked attacks on freedom of the press. Two federal courts flatly rejected prosecuting Lemon because the evidence for these vindictive and unconstitutional charges was insufficient, and Lemon has every right to document news and inform the public. Instead of accepting that humiliating defeat, the government has now doubled down.

“These arrests, under bogus legal theories for obviously constitutionally protected reporting, are clear warning shots aimed at other journalists. The unmistakable message is that journalists must tread cautiously because the government is looking for any way to target them. Fort’s arrest is meant to instill the same fear in local independent journalists as big names like Lemon.

“The answer to this outrageous attack is not fear or self-censorship. It’s an even stronger commitment to journalism, the truth, and the First Amendment. If the Trump administration thinks it can bully journalists into submission, it is wrong. We’ve recently seen that even in the Trump era, public pressure still can work. It’s time to do it again. News outlets across the political spectrum need to loudly defend Lemon’s and Fort’s rights. Journalists are not making themselves the story, Trump is.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

New York, Jan. 28, 2026 — A judge reportedly granted asylum today to Guan Heng, a whistleblower who secretly filmed Uyghur internment camps in China and shared his footage online after arriving in the United States. The footage he captured became crucial evidence for journalists reporting on the camps, including the team at BuzzFeed News that won a Pulitzer Prize.

The Department of Homeland Security has 30 days to appeal, during which time Guan will remain in detention. Guan and his relatives have said that if he is deported to China, his life would be in serious jeopardy.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said:

“This ruling is evidence that even in today’s environment, public pressure still works. All of the journalists, activists, editorial board members, and others who spoke out about Guan’s case deserve enormous credit. They should carry that momentum to other fronts in the very active battles for the rights of whistleblowers, journalists, and people who film government wrongdoing, whether in China or Minneapolis. DHS should not wait the full 30 days to drop this case. It should announce immediately that it will not appeal, so Guan can walk free. And it should give serious thought to why an immigration crackdown supposedly intended to target the worst of the worst is endangering the best of the best.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

The murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota once again show the power of cellphone footage in combating official lies. Solely because footage was so clear that even the Trump administration knew its story wasn’t credible, the party line shifted within hours of Pretti’s shooting from comments about a “terrorist” planning a “massacre” to something akin to “jaywalking is now a capital offense.”

These days, cellphone videographers are also a vital part of the news ecosystem, serving as crucial source material for reporters who can’t be everywhere at once. That means shooting, killing, censoring, and other targeting of individuals documenting news as it unfolds is an attack on press freedom (and an offense against all else that’s good in the world).

It doesn’t matter if they’re journalists. Recording police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is an act of journalism, no matter who does it. If those recording are not journalists themselves, their relationship with the press is symbiotic. They’re journalists’ sources — even whistleblowers.

Decades ago, the way to blow the whistle on government misconduct was to leak documents like the Pentagon Papers. Those methods are still vital, of course. That’s why the administration is trying so hard to stop them. But footage is just as powerful, maybe more so.

And the courage of those recording in the street rivals that of people like Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and National Security Agency surveillance whistleblower Ed Snowden, both longtime board members of Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). The latter group risked life behind bars, but the former risk being assaulted or shot dead by federal agents.

Cellphone footage also poses a more ubiquitous threat to the powerful than leaked documents. Only government contractors and employees have the ability to leak documents — virtually everyone has a cellphone. And that’s exactly why the government is cracking down on cellphone videographers with the same tactics it has long used against old-school whistleblowers.

The government is cracking down on cellphone videographers with the same tactics it has long used against old-school whistleblowers.

Whenever someone leaks government secrets to the press, no matter who is in the White House, the same pattern almost invariably plays out. Important-sounding people in suits and military uniforms pop up on the Sunday shows and op-ed pages warning about the dire threat to national security posed by the disclosures, which never materializes. Government spokespeople and their stenographers in the media nitpick at the leakers’ personal lives, question their motives, and call them traitors. What they actually revealed about government corruption and incompetence gets buried beneath the fearmongering and name-calling.

Similarly, the government now characterizes cellphone recording as obstructive or even violent. Officials claim agents are being “doxxed” when someone records their face or reveals their name, and complain about wildly exaggerated or entirely fabricated dangers they’re facing. ICE-watchers are accused of being part of some amorphous domestic terror conspiracy — their names might even be populating a government domestic terror watch list, according to some agents.

Their phones are often unlawfully seized or damaged before they can post their footage on social media, where journalists might find and report on it. A lawsuit seeking to force the federal government to preserve evidence from Pretti’s killing claims that federal agents “apparently seized cell phones and detained witnesses,” tactics that can both intimidate those who film and prevent their footage from seeing the light of day, just like newsroom raids intimidate and censor journalists and sources.

This didn’t start with Trump 2.0, of course, and, for whatever reason, the Twin Cities have been at the center of the story for years. Darnella Frazier didn’t have a press credential around her neck when she recorded Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. When Philando Castile was shot during a traffic stop in 2016, Diamond Reynolds’ livestreamed footage captured a killing that would otherwise have been framed as justified.

Thousands of miles away, cellphone footage was crucial in exposing Israel’s crimes in Gaza. Palestinians, many with no prior journalistic training, took unfathomable risks to ensure that Israeli officials could not get away with the same kinds of lies and pretexts that U.S. officials now spew after killings of civilians (just replace “Hamas” with “the worst of the worst”).

One of this year’s Oscar nominees for best documentary is “The Alabama Solution,” which highlights reforms prompted by incarcerated people — including Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, and Raoul Poole — using contraband cellphones to document abuses. They risked and endured severe retaliation (they heard about the Oscar nomination from solitary confinement) to expose the truth because the press doesn’t cover prisons like it should. That’s both due to news companies not seeing any money in it and the government drastically restricting access.

As corporate and government pressures against accountability journalism continue to mount, the outside world might be similarly dependent on its Councils, Rays, and Pooles to expose the truth. Horrors like Pretti’s murder are tragic losses not only to the victims’ families and communities but to what’s left of the free press in the United States.

Correction: This post has been revised to reflect that Edward Snowden was not a founding board member of FPF.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Recently unsealed documents further demonstrate that Rümeysa Öztürk has been facing deportation for 304 days solely for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, despite officials being fully aware that she has no known ties to antisemitism or terrorism. Meanwhile, journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on. Read on for more of the week’s press freedom stories, including some much-needed good news.

DOJ fails in ridiculous attempt to prosecute Don Lemon

On Jan. 22, a federal court shut down the administration’s outrageous effort to charge journalist Don Lemon for simply reporting on an anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis, Minnesota, church. The complaint and supporting affidavit against Lemon and his co-defendants show why. (Lemon’s name is redacted, but the complaint’s description matches the content of his livestream.)

Officials apparently sought to charge Lemon under a federal law banning intentionally obstructing or interfering with places of religious worship. That’s not what he did — his only intention was to document a newsworthy event. They also tried charging him under an equally inapplicable federal conspiracy law. The administration appears to rely on three not-so “smoking guns”: That Lemon livestreamed the protest, that he assured sources he would maintain confidences, and that he approached the pastor and asked him questions. Attorney General Pam Bondi was reportedly “enraged” that a judge did not believe this routine journalistic conduct was criminal.

Now, the government says it’s still exploring other ways to prosecute him. As Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern told The Advocate, these attacks are “the latest example of the administration coming up with far-fetched ‘gotcha’ legal theories to send a message to journalists to tread cautiously because the government is looking for any way to target them.”

• Read the failed complaint

Judge halts search of records seized from Washington Post reporter

A judge on Jan. 21 temporarily blocked the government from searching data it seized during the outrageous raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home earlier in the month.

Stern said in a statement that the raid “wasn’t about any criminal investigation, and certainly wasn’t about national security. It was a fishing expedition intended to intimidate and retaliate against a journalist who had managed to cultivate sources all over the government.” He called for the judge to permanently bar the government from snooping into Natanson’s newsgathering. Even if her devices aren’t searched, she needs them back to be able to do her job.

• Read the statement here

Supreme Court could greenlight tracking reporters’ locations

The Natanson raid reignited discussions about how reporters can protect confidential sources and sensitive information, with some suggesting a return to old-school in-person meetings.

But if the Supreme Court gets it wrong in a new case, Chatrie v. United States, those won’t be safe from surveillance either. FPF Senior Adviser Caitlin Vogus explains why a ruling that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement does not apply to the use of “geofences” to obtain location data could greenlight mass surveillance on an enormous scale, posing a direct threat to journalists and their sources.

• Read more here

Rep. Luna’s stunning First Amendment hypocrisy

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is leading the charge to subpoena journalist Seth Harp and have him prosecuted for posting the name of a Delta Force commander involved in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

She claims Harp’s reporting violated the Espionage Act (among other completely inapplicable laws). But just a couple of years ago, Luna co-sponsored a resolution calling on the Biden administration to drop charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The resolution rightly proclaimed that journalists have a First Amendment right to publish classified information.

Vogus wrote about Luna’s astounding hypocrisy and the need to reform the Espionage Act for Luna’s local paper, the Tampa Bay Times.

• Read the op-ed

FCC’s latest attack on late-night may preview new anti-press strategy

With raids and subpoenas dominating press freedom news so far in 2026, last year’s censorship supervillain, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, has been flying under the radar. He must have gotten jealous, because he’s back.

In an administration full of bootlickers, Carr stands out with pitiful displays of fealty, like his Donald Trump lapel pin. He’s the last person you want deciding which news broadcasts are sufficiently “bona fide” to qualify for editorial independence. And yet, as Vogus explains, a new FCC guidance could position him to attempt just that.

• Read more here

What we're reading Israel kills 3 journalists in Gaza, including CBS News contributor The Washington Post

Three more journalists, including one who worked for both AFP and CBS, have been added to the devastating tally of the dead, despite the so-called ceasefire. Clearly, Israel and the United States don’t care about the deaths of journalists, or any civilians, in Gaza, but reporters and news organizations must speak out and demand accountability. That includes you, CBS.

ICE escalates war on civilian accountability Salon

ICE frequently cites broad laws and loose concepts to intimidate those who record them. But as Stern explained, “It is not stalking to follow a law enforcement officer to document what they’re up to — that’s constitutionally protected conduct.”

Hours after ABC News ran a story about a Minnesota toy store, ICE agents arrived at their door The Seattle Times

Speaking of intimidation: ICE doesn’t want people criticizing them to reporters either, apparently. Scare tactics meant to silence sources are straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

Judge removes Las Vegas Review-Journal staff from courtroom Las Vegas Review-Journal

A judge can’t order journalists not to publish information disclosed in public court records and open court. Judge Jessica Peterson either doesn’t understand the First Amendment or doesn’t care.

When federal agents raided Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home earlier this month, it reignited discussions about how reporters can protect confidential sources and sensitive information.

“Having reported from dozens of countries with various levels of surveillance, I’ve found that the safest method for interacting with sources who would face the most jeopardy if exposed is to meet in person and cover your tracks,” said Steve Herman, executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation, in a recent statement by the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

That’s good advice. But “covering your tracks” when meeting sources isn’t always easy. And a new Supreme Court case, Chatrie v. United States, could make it harder.

The dangers of geofence warrants

At the heart of the Chatrie case are legal orders known as geofence warrants. This controversial tool allows police to demand location data from tech companies (usually Google) to see every device in a specific area at a specific time. Imagine drawing a digital fence around a crime scene and demanding a list of every phone that crossed into it.

These demands can reveal precise details about people’s movements and locations. Authorities can pinpoint where someone stood within a couple of yards and whether they were on the first or second floor of a building.

But geofence warrants are also imprecise: They sweep up the movements not just of suspects but also of innocent people who happen to be within the digital fence. Demanding location data for a 150-yard radius of a bank in the hour before it was robbed, for example, may show the movements of people who worked at the bank, visited the psychiatrist’s office next door, worshipped at the church on the neighboring block, or dropped into the nearby strip club.

Lower courts disagree about whether these demands violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Some have held that they’re categorically unconstitutional. Others, like the appeals court that made the initial decision in Chatrie, have held that geofences are not a “search” under the Fourth Amendment and would be perfectly constitutional even without a warrant.

Now, the Supreme Court will decide. If the court holds that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement does not apply to the use of geofences to obtain location data, it could greenlight mass surveillance on an enormous scale. The government could require tech companies to turn over location data, enabling it to surveil protesters, members of dissenting groups, and even the press.

A direct threat to journalists and sources

For journalists, the threat of their location data landing in the government’s hands is real. As our digital security training team at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) explains:

“Consider a sensitive story in which you are meeting a high-risk, anonymous source in person. Your adversaries could use location data to determine that you and the source were in the same spot at the same time, leading to the possible exposure of the source’s identity.

“Or perhaps you need to visit a particular location (e.g., a government building) that could put a given department or agency on notice that you are investigating them, in turn making the reporting process more challenging.”

Geofence warrants could easily expose confidential sources or tip off powerful government institutions that a reporter is investigating them. A single geofence warrant centered on a newsroom, for instance, could reveal everyone who’s visited, from whistleblowers to workers.

Even reporters who take precautions, like meeting sources in neutral locations, might not be safe. A geofence warrant could place them within yards of each other in the same parking garage or cafe, revealing their connection.

Holding that the Fourth Amendment applies to geofence warrants would prevent some of these abuses. Under the Fourth Amendment, courts must only approve warrants if there’s probable cause, which is unlikely to exist in fishing expeditions targeting journalists to uncover their confidential sources.

Why this matters, even after Google’s changes

Google took an important step in 2023 by changing how it stores user location data and for how long, making it harder for the government to use geofence warrants. But these protections aren’t foolproof. Other location data collected by Google or other companies could be vulnerable to geofence warrants.

As a result, the court’s decision in Chatrie still matters, and journalists may still want to take steps to limit exposure of their location data.

The outcome of Chatrie also touches on a deeper Fourth Amendment issue that could reverberate beyond geofence warrants: the “third-party doctrine.” This decades-old legal rule says that people lose their reasonable expectation of privacy once they share information voluntarily with third parties, like a phone company or a bank.

The court has limited the third-party doctrine in recent years, most famously in its decision in Carpenter v. United States. But its ruling in Chatrie has the potential to swing the pendulum back toward less privacy. That could impact Fourth Amendment protections for all kinds of data shared with third parties, such as information stored in the cloud or sensitive searches.

Every journalist, source, and citizen should be paying attention and demanding greater privacy protections from the courts and from Congress. If privacy is restricted in this case, our First Amendment rights are too. The free press can’t exist in a surveillance state.

Authoritarians hate being laughed at. Maybe that’s why Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr continues to pick fights with late-night comedians.

Carr’s latest swipe is a public notice released on Jan. 21, 2026, warning late-night and daytime talk shows that their programs might no longer qualify for an exception to the FCC’s “equal time” rule.

The equal time rule requires broadcast stations that allow one candidate for office to use their airways during non-news programming to provide an equal opportunity for other candidates to do the same. Remember when Carr lost his mind about Kamala Harris appearing on “Saturday Night Live”? That was about the equal time rule.

NBC, to be clear, did not violate the rule. But the freak-out was a preview of how Carr is now preparing to use the rule against those who speak out against President Donald Trump.

Critically, the FCC’s public notice isn’t just a shot across the bow of Jimmy Kimmel, “The View,” and similar shows. It’s also a threat to every broadcast newsroom in the country.

That’s because of how the notice talks about an exception to the equal time rule for “bona fide” newscasts, news interviews, news documentaries, and on-the-spot news coverage. That exception is required by statute, but the law leaves the FCC the discretion as to what counts as a “bona fide.” The First Amendment restricts the FCC’s discretion, but it’s still dangerous. Carr has shown again and again how little he cares for constitutional limits.

In this instance, the public notice goes out of its way to stress that programs that “serve a political agenda” or are “unfairly putting their thumbs on the scale of one political candidate or set of candidates over another” do not qualify for the exception. That sounds reasonable, until you ask an obvious question: Who decides what is designed to serve a political agenda, or what it means to unfairly put a thumb on the scale?

Turns out it’s the not-so-independent FCC that would get to decide. And that’s a big problem.

Carr takes his marching orders from Trump, who believes that any news program that isn’t lavishly praising him is biased against him. The White House literally maintains a website dedicated to denouncing major news outlets, including broadcasters, as enemies and Democratic propagandists for the “crime” of reporting facts. Trump trots out made-up statistics (“97% BAD STORIES”!) to smear news outlets as partisan.

ABC, NBC, CBS — it doesn’t matter. Even capitulation doesn’t buy safety. CBS humiliated itself by paying Trump $16 million to settle a frivolous lawsuit, and ABC didn’t do much better by shelling out $15 million on a case it could have won. Yet Trump still accuses them of bias and even threatens to sue them again all the time.

Stations that want to continue to claim the exception may strive to ensure their coverage meets the approval of Carr and Trump, in a warped recreation of the old and discredited Fairness Doctrine.

Against this backdrop, it’s not hard to imagine this FCC chair — who wears a gold lapel pin of Trump’s face and has selective amnesia when it comes to the First Amendment — deciding that broadcast news aired on ABC, CBS, or NBC stations are not “bona fide” news programs because, according to the president, they “serve a political agenda.”

That would hand the federal government even more regulatory power to shape broadcast programming. Stations that want to continue to claim the exception may strive to ensure their coverage meets the approval of Carr and Trump, in a warped recreation of the old and discredited Fairness Doctrine.

Stations that don’t modify their coverage and are found not to qualify for the exception as a result could be forced to provide free airtime to candidates they don’t invite to appear on their news programs. Worse, Carr could hold up mergers and other transactions requiring FCC approval for licensees that don’t follow his interpretation of the equal time rule.

Sure, broadcasters could challenge Carr’s edicts under the First Amendment, but that’s a long process that would only further draw government ire in the meantime.

Enforcement of the exception under Carr’s possible new interpretation also would not necessarily be equal. The FCC could aggressively demand “equal time” for Trump-aligned candidates while ignoring violations that shut out Democrats.

Congress knew that without the bona fide news exception to the equal time rule, broadcast news may avoid covering candidates and campaigns, and would be forced to “both sides” discussions where one side is obviously lying. Stripping away that protection will result in a chilling effect that Congress was specifically trying to prevent.

That’s especially true when stations have to worry about the rule being turned against them by a hyperpartisan FCC chair. The result is that the public will be less likely to hear from candidates on broadcast news programs, especially those who may criticize Trump or other Republicans.

Congress must act to stop this reinterpretation of the equal time rule and bona fide news exemption in its tracks. Oversight hearings are a good start, but lawmakers should also amend the Communications Act to put in guardrails that prevent the FCC from acting as a censor in chief and an arbiter of free speech. Whether it’s late-night TV or the nightly news, free speech shouldn’t be subject to the whims of Brendan Carr and Donald Trump.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2026 — A judge today blocked the government from searching data it seized during the outrageous raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home last week.

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

“The search and seizure of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s records is unconstitutional and illegal in its entirety. But even the Trump administration’s policies require searches of journalists’ materials to be narrow and targeted and that authorities use filter teams and other measures to avoid searching protected records. That the administration wouldn’t follow its own guidelines shows that the raid on Natanson’s home wasn’t about any criminal investigation, and certainly wasn’t about national security. It was a fishing expedition intended to intimidate and retaliate against a journalist who had managed to cultivate sources all over the government. The judge was right to block it until a full hearing at which time he should block it permanently.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

More recent assaults on the First Amendment are dominating the headlines, but Rümeysa Öztürk has now been facing deportation for 297 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on. Read on for more on a virtually unprecedented (and only half over) month of attacks on press freedom.

Raid of journalist’s home ignores federal law and constitutional freedoms

The FBI raid of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, reportedly to investigate a contractor accused of mishandling classified records, marked an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. All the meanwhile, Post billionaire owner Jeff Bezos remains silent.

The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which restricts law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters. The administration may now be in possession of volumes of journalist communications having nothing to do with any pending investigation.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern, along with Chip Gibbons of Defending Rights & Dissent, wrote for The Guardian that, alarming as it was, the raid was the product of a decades-long backslide at both the federal and local level. And our Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper wrote for The Intercept about how the raid was enabled by the Department of Justice’s revisions to its guidelines on searching journalists’ files. Harper previously exposed that the administration’s pretext for those revisions was a lie.

Reporter and security researcher Nikita Mazurov also wrote for us about measures reporters can take to minimize the risk to sources in the event of a raid or device seizure.

• Read our statement on the raid

Don’t forget last week’s alarming intrusion on newsgathering

We told you last week about the House Oversight Committee’s bipartisan vote to subpoena journalist Seth Harp over a tweet identifying a high ranking military officer involved in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Democrats reportedly supported the subpoena as part of a deal to also issue subpoenas related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. That was a big mistake — journalist subpoenas are a constitutional red line, not a bargaining chip. After all, if not for the source relationships that enabled reporters like the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown to expose Epstein’s crimes, he might still be on his island preying on young girls.

Worse yet, the subpoena will allow proponents of the Natanson raid and future intrusions to legitimize and “both sides” their assaults on the Constitution. You can use our action center tool to tell Congress to clean up the mess it made.

• Write to your representative here

What the Maduro ‘extradition’ means for U.S. journalists

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 abduct Maduro risks normalizing extraterritorial arrests for violations of the arresting country’s domestic laws, bypassing extradition procedures and other protections. As former federal computer crime prosecutor Mark Rasch wrote in a guest post for FPF, a country with repressive press laws could use the Trump administration’s actions to justify arresting U.S. journalists at home over online publications accessible elsewhere.

• Read more here

Wikipedia’s 25th birthday proves the power of free speech

Over the last quarter century, Wikipedia has gone from the source that teachers universally clamored “you can’t trust it” to one of the most reliable sources in a world of “disinformation” and AI-generated slop.

As FPF senior software engineer and volunteer Wikipedia editor Kunal Mehta explains, Wikipedia can only exist because of the robust free speech and free press safeguards that protect it (for now) in the United States.

• Read more here

Town hall on authoritarianism and the news

Rising authoritarianism impacts the news you depend on, whether you’re making choices in the ballot box or the doctor’s office. Journalists are facing increasing dangers that impact their work and their personal lives. FPF co-sponsored a town hall, available to stream now, which takes you behind the scenes of your news in 2026.

• Watch it here

What we're reading Stars and Stripes job applicants are asked if they back Trump policies The Washington Post

The same people who spent years whining about alleged bias in government-funded media are now extracting loyalty pledges from prospective reporters and promising to refocus the newsroom of a publication that is statutorily guaranteed independence.

Who isn’t a domestic terrorist: 19th Prairieland defendant should concern us all National Lawyers Guild

Any effort to criminalize use of encryption is a serious threat to press freedom — especially coming from the current administration. It’s noteworthy that this is the same prosecution in which the government seeks to criminalize possession of literature.

Mamdani names new media commissioner, undoes Adams’ 11th hour press access changes New York Daily News

Former Mayor Eric Adams tried to restrict press access in New York just before his term ended. Good for his successor, Zohran Mamdani, for killing the proposed rules.

I’m a community journalist in New York City. Here’s why Mamdani’s ‘influencer presser’ stung Poynter

On the other hand, Mamdani should not overlook community journalists in favor of friendly influencers. Sure, social media influences the youth, but young people also need to know how to critically consume real news so their opinions aren’t dictated by algorithms.

In the mid-1700s, Denis Diderot published his Encyclopédie in France, collecting the work of more than 140 authors to summarize the Enlightenment. It quickly landed on the Catholic Church’s banned books list for including contrarian thoughts, and, at one point, his publisher preemptively censored some content without Diderot’s knowledge.

Around the same time, King George III censored the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, requiring the removal of some anatomically correct drawings in an article about midwifery.

So when the 13 newly independent American states ratified the First Amendment a few decades later, it laid the groundwork not only for a free press but also for an encyclopedia that was not censored by an oppressive government.

Today, we celebrate the realization of that dream in the form of Wikipedia, which over the past 25 years has been collaboratively built by unpaid strangers on the internet. Wikipedia went from the source that teachers universally clamored “you can’t trust it” to one of the most reliable sources in a world of “disinformation” and AI-generated slop.

Despite not being written by professional journalists (I edit it myself as a volunteer and used to work for its nonprofit host, Wikimedia Foundation), it’s still able to set trends and drive narratives. For example, in 2011, Wikipedia editors started collating a list of people killed by law enforcement in the U.S., three years before The Washington Post would win a Pulitzer for its version of the same.

And for better or worse, Wikipedia is most likely the largest single source powering today’s AI models. All in all, it’s the largest repository of knowledge in human history.

But it’s important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.

But it’s important to understand and appreciate that Wikipedia only exists because of the robust free speech and free press protections that exist in the United States.

Kunal Mehta

Wikipedia has never been actively censored in the U.S., nor has any U.S.-based editor ever been arrested for their edits to Wikipedia. There’s never even been a serious threat of censorship of Wikipedia by the federal government. (The FBI once demanded Wikipedia stop using its seal under a law written to stop impersonation of federal agents; Wikipedia’s legal team laughed it off.)

The same cannot be said about Wikipedia in other countries. In France, intelligence operatives held a Wikipedia administrator until he deleted an article about a military radio station, under the guise it contained classified information. Agents made this demand even though the information in question wasn’t classified at all and was mostly based on a documentary that the French air force had worked on and publicly released.

In India, a court required Wikipedia to remove an article about a news agency because it was supposedly defamatory. To top it off, the court then demanded Wikipedia remove the separate article that was written about the court case and removal order!

This kind of censorship shouldn’t happen in the U.S. The Supreme Court ruled the First Amendment protects publishing classified information in a case about the Pentagon Papers. A U.S. court cannot order an article to be taken down, as that would be an unconstitutional prior restraint.

In the U.S., the law known as Section 230 would also protect Wikipedia from defamation claims, and instead require litigants to sue the editor who actually wrote and published the allegedly defamatory content. Those editors would be protected under the First Amendment and the high court’s New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which requires defamation claims from public officials — later expanded to public figures — to meet the much higher standard of actual malice to win (nearly every biography on Wikipedia is of a public figure, by policy).

And to state the obvious, the U.S. has never blocked all of Wikipedia, unlike China (since 2015), Myanmar (since 2021), or Turkey, which did so from 2017 until an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights forced that nation to unblock it in 2020. We know of one editor, Bassel Khartabil, who was executed for their online activity, and a few others who are incarcerated in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.

Certainly, there are plenty of people in power who wish they could censor or control Wikipedia. At first, it was through editing: In 2006, a number of Congressional staffers were caught whitewashing their bosses’ biographies, and, in 2007, someone at the FBI tried to remove images from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp article.

Then, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked that the National Security Agency was illegally spying on Wikipedia readers and editors, revealing that the U.S. had adopted the same playbook as China. Wikipedia responded by encrypting all connections using HTTPS a few years later, and (unsuccessfully) sued the NSA for First and Fourth amendment violations.

The attacks against Wikipedia are starting to ramp up once again; last year saw ethically compromised interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin and Sen. Ted Cruz complain about Wikipedia’s supposed left-wing bias, despite the First Amendment prohibiting the government from acting as speech police. We’ve also seen bits of the First Amendment firewall begin to crumble, with judges green-lighting prior restraints, or bipartisan groups of lawmakers working to repeal Section 230.

It will require a concerted effort by all of us to not just maintain existing First Amendment protections, but to expand them. That’s the only way Wikipedia will thrive for another 25 years.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

This morning, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, reportedly in connection with an investigation of a system administrator accused of accessing and taking home classified intelligence reports.

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

“This is an alarming escalation in the Trump administration’s multipronged war on press freedom. The Department of Justice (and the judge who approved this outrageous warrant) is either ignoring or distorting the Privacy Protection Act, which bars law enforcement from raiding newsrooms and reporters to search for evidence of alleged crimes by others, with very few inapplicable exceptions.

“The government has said that Natanson is not under investigation, nor should she be for simply reporting information provided to her by sources. Even the Trump DOJ’s guidelines on searching reporters’ source materials (which were weakened from prior guidelines based on the administration’s proven lies about “fake news”) make clear that it’s a last resort for rare emergencies only. The administration may now be in possession of volumes of journalist communications having nothing to do with any pending investigation and, if investigators are able to access them, we have zero faith that they will respect journalist-source confidentiality.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

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.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Welcome to 2026. Rümeysa Öztürk has now been facing deportation for 290 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on. Read on for more on the year’s turbulent start for press freedom.

House committee votes to subpoena journalist for Venezuela reporting

A motion introduced Jan. 7 by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., to subpoena journalist Seth Harp passed the House Oversight Committee in a bipartisan voice vote. Luna accused Harp of “leaking classified intel about Operation Absolute Resolve, including doxxing a Delta Force commander.”

The next day, Luna wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi calling for a criminal investigation of Harp. The journalist, however, merely reported the name and publicly available online biography of the commander involved in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In a statement we issued with Defending Rights & Dissent and the First Amendment Foundation following the subpoena, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern explained that, “Identifying government officials by name is not doxxing or harassment, no matter how many times Trump allies say otherwise.” Everyone who supported Luna’s motion — including Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the oversight committee — should be ashamed.

• Read the statement

John Cusack wants to talk about paywalls

Actor and activist John Cusack, a founding board member of FPF, spoke to Columbia Journalism Review about why more news outlets need to remove paywalls for reporting based on Freedom of Information Act requests.

“There’s an irony in the fact that FOIA-based reporting often ends up behind a paywall, because the public owns government records. We fund their creation through taxes, and we fund the agencies that produce them. We fund the FOIA office that processes the disclosure request—the entire apparatus is built on the premise that this information belongs to us,” Cusack said.

He’s not just making a moral case, though. As Cusack notes, outlets like Wired and 404 Media have seen subscriptions surge after unpaywalling their public records reporting.

• Read the interview

The document giving ICE 80 million Medicaid patients’ data

Last year, FPF and 404 Media sued the Department of Homeland Security for a copy of a data-sharing agreement enabling Immigration and Customs Enforcement to receive personal data of Medicaid patients after the agency failed to turn it over in response to FOIA requests. A U.S. attorney working on that case then flagged that the document had quietly been released in a separate lawsuit.

At the end of December, a judge ruled that the Trump administration could resume sharing much of the data after it had been blocked from doing so, Politico reported. That means ICE can use Medicaid data in deportation cases starting Jan. 6, Politico added.

• Read more here

Don’t forget who really sold out CBS News

It’s easy to understand why the outrage over CBS News’ recent self-censorship and propaganda — from spiking stories to airing segments “saluting” the politicians it’s supposed to scrutinize — has largely been directed at CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss and her boss, Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison.

But, as Stern wrote for The Contrarian, let’s not forget who first sold out CBS News: former Paramount Chair Shari Redstone.

• Read the article

Transparency did not delay justice for Kelly or Epstein. Prosecutors did

One of the prosecutors who helped put sexual predator and R&B star R. Kelly behind bars wrote that releasing the Jeffrey Epstein documents without extensive redactions would hinder future prosecutions. Transparency, argued Elizabeth Geddes, would interfere with investigators gaming out 3D chess moves to build airtight cases against Epstein’s associates.

Most Americans, however, don’t share her confidence in the system that packs private prisons with small-time offenders while the Epsteins and Kellys of the world walk free for decades. In fact, there’s an excellent chance both of them would still be preying on young girls from Chicago to the U.S. Virgin Islands if not for the transparency forced by dogged journalism.

Stern and Jim DeRogatis, the reporter who broke the R. Kelly story, wrote about how misguided Geddes’ take and others like it are.

• Read more here

What we're reading A rough year for journalists in 2025, with a little hope for things to turn around The Associated Press

The year 2025 was a dangerous one for journalists in the U.S., reports the AP, citing our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. There were at least 170 assaults on journalists last year, 94% of them at the hands of law enforcement.

2025 left a stressed-out First Amendment Free Speech Center

“By any measure, 2025 was a stressful year for those who worry about the First Amendment and its status as the bedrock of American liberty.”

The battle for press freedom in the streets Columbia Journalism Review

Journalists who experience press freedom abuses should speak out and document the incidents on social media, in their publications, and via the Tracker, FPF Deputy Director of Advocacy Adam Rose told CJR.

Filming ICE agents is a First Amendment right. So why might it land you in jail? Straight Arrow News

“There’s a reason DHS and its counterparts keep getting humiliated in court when they pretend to be victims,” Rose told Straight Arrow News. “They’re losing in front of juries, judges are calling them not credible.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A motion introduced today by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., to subpoena journalist Seth Harp passed unanimously in the House Oversight Committee. Luna accused Harp of “leaking classified intel about Operation Absolute Resolve, including doxxing a Delta Force commander.”

The motion was apparently in response to Harp’s reporting the name and publicly available online biography of the commander involved in the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Politico reports that the subpoena appears to have arisen from an agreement between Luna and California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia to issue a flurry of subpoenas, including some relating to Jeffrey Epstein. Garcia reportedly supported the Harp subpoena.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said:

“Journalists don’t work for the government and can’t ‘leak’ government information — to the contrary, it’s their job to find and publish the news, whether the government wants it made public or not. Identifying government officials by name is not doxxing or harassment, no matter how many times Trump allies say otherwise. Reporters have a constitutional right to publish even classified leaks, as long as they don’t commit any crimes to obtain them, but Harp merely published information that was publicly available about someone at the center of the world’s biggest news story. In 2024, the House unanimously passed the PRESS Act to protect journalists from subpoenas about their newsgathering. The bill died after Trump ordered the Senate to kill it on Truth Social. Apparently, so did the principles of Reps. Luna, Garcia, and their colleagues.”

Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, said:

“Rep. Luna’s subpoena of investigative reporter Seth Harp is clearly designed to chill and intimidate a journalist doing some of the most significant investigative reporting on U.S. Special Forces. Her own statement makes clear that far from having a valid legislative purpose, she seeks to hold a journalist ‘accountable’ for what is essentially reporting she dislikes. Her rationale is based on easily debunkable disinformation. Harp did not share classified information about the U.S. regime change operation in Venezuela. And even if he had, his actions would firmly be protected by the First Amendment. This is a dangerous assault on the press freedom, as well as the U.S. people’s right to know. It is shameful it passed the committee.”

Bobby Block, executive director of Florida’s First Amendment Foundation, added:

“This is a naked attempt to intimidate a journalist for doing his job. Rep. Luna’s own words make clear this subpoena has no legitimate legislative purpose — it’s about punishing reporting she doesn’t like. That kind of abuse of power strikes at the heart of the First Amendment and threatens the public’s right to know.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

New York, Dec. 18, 2025 — Photojournalist Dave Decker was arrested in November while documenting a protest in Miami, Florida. A coalition of 23 press organizations spoke out against the charges — and this week the prosecutor agreed.

The following statement can be attributed to Adam Rose, deputy director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):

“Journalists have a distinct role at protests. They are not participants, merely observers. A broad local and national coalition said this in unison, and we were glad to see all charges dropped against Dave Decker. Hats off to his attorneys, lawyers for the Florida State Attorney’s Office and the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, and all the community groups who rallied to his side.

“At the same time, that’s a lot of people who had to work on something entirely preventable. I hope law enforcement officers take this to heart: Swearing an oath to protect the community means protecting everyone — including press. This is an opportunity for agencies like the sheriff’s office and Florida Highway Patrol to take proactive steps and review training approaches. Freedom of the Press Foundation is happy to help.

“And of course, it would be nice to see an apology to Dave and an offer to fix any of his equipment they damaged.”

Read the coalition’s letter:

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Rümeysa Öztürk has been facing deportation for 268 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on.

Join us today and Dec. 21 in New York City for two special screenings of the Oscar-shortlisted film “Cover-Up” by Laura Poitras — an FPF founding board member — and Mark Obenhaus.

Read on for more on what we’re working on this week. We’ll be back in the new year.

Covering protests is a dangerous job for journalists

As of Dec. 15, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented 32 detainments or charges against journalists in the U.S. — 28 of those at immigration-related protests — according to a new report released by the Freedom of Press Foundation (FPF) project this week.

The report notes how, unlike most years, the majority of journalists were released without charges or had them soon dropped, with law enforcement instead focusing on deterring news gathering rather than pursuing charges.

• Read the report

Stop the deportation of Guan Heng

Use our action center to tell lawmakers to stop the Trump administration from deporting Guan Heng, who helped journalists expose the horrors of Uyghur prison camps in Xinjiang, China. He’s exactly the kind of person asylum laws are intended to protect.

The next hearing in Guan’s case is Jan. 12. He could be sent to Uganda, placing him at risk of being shipped back to China, where, according to his mother, he’d likely be killed.

• Write a letter to Congress

Sign Up. Take Action.

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The FCC’s declaration of dependence

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr admitted at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that there had been a political “sea change” and he no longer viewed the FCC as an independent agency.

FPF Director of Advocacy Seth Stern wrote for The Guardian that Carr’s admission proves the danger of letting a self-proclaimed partisan weaponize the FCC’s public interest standard to grant himself amorphous censorship powers. “Carr avoids ever articulating his vision of public-interest news, forcing anyone seeking to avoid his ire to play ‘Whac-A-Mole.’ … The only discernible rule of Carr’s FCC is ’don’t piss off Trump’.”

• Read the op-ed here

Trump’s BBC lawsuit is nonsense, like his others

President Donald Trump on Monday followed through on his threats to sue the BBC over its editing of his remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, for a documentary.

“If any ordinary person filed as many frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits as Donald Trump, they’d be sanctioned and placed on a restricted filers list,” FPF said in a statement, noting that Trump has demanded a total of $65 billion in damages from media outlets since taking office.

• Read the statement

Under First Amendment, Diddy ‘can’t stop, won’t stop’ Netflix documentary

Sean “Diddy” Combs is threatening to sue Netflix for airing a docuseries that is, to say the least, unflattering to him. The disgraced music mogul’s cease-and-desist letter claims the series, “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” uses “stolen footage.”

Stern wrote for Rolling Stone about why Diddy’s threatened lawsuit would be a non-starter: the right to publish content that sources obtain illegally is well established. But a series of recent cases nonetheless puts that right under unprecedented attack.

• Read the article

Body camera footage is for the public

The town of Hamburg, New York, claims its police body camera footage is copyrighted despite being a public record. It’s telling people who request footage under New York’s Freedom of Information Law that they can’t share the footage with others.

That’s ridiculous, and we wrote a letter to the police chief telling him to stop the nonsense and tell anyone who has received these frivolous warnings that they’re free to share body camera footage as they see fit.

• Read it here

Ask Lauren anything

FPF Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper joined fellow Freedom of Information Act experts Jason Leopold, ​​Liz Hempowicz, and Kevin Bell to take questions about FOIA and the numerous ways that it’s broken. They teamed up for a Reddit “ask me anything” discussion this week.

• Read the Q&A

Free screening of “Cover-Up”

To our New York audiences and documentary film buffs: FPF is proud to host a special screening tonight of the Oscar-shortlisted film “Cover-Up” by award-winning directors Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, followed by a Q&A moderated by our executive director, Trevor Timm. The film chronicles the career of legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

• Learn more here

What we're reading The Pentagon and the press NPR

It’s shameful the Department of Defense is curtailing press access five decades after the Supreme Court’s Pentagon Papers ruling, Harper told NPR’s “1A.” Harper also joined “1A” to discuss how the Trump administration is enhancing its surveillance capabilities.

The US supreme court’s TikTok ruling is a scandal The Guardian

That TikTok remains available “makes a mockery” of the government’s earlier national security claims that the platform was “an urgent national security risk – and of the court that deferred to those claims.”

How an AM radio station in California weathered the Trump administration’s assault on media Associated Press

“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said one former KCBS journalist about the aftermath of Carr’s threats.

Defend the press: Brendan Carr has gone too far with attacks on media Courier

Read the op-ed we co-wrote with partner organizations demanding the FCC recommit to the First Amendment.

Paramount’s Warner Bros Discovery bid faces conflict of interest concerns Al Jazeera

Stern explained, “Throwing out the credibility of CNN and other Warner Bros Discovery holdings might benefit the Ellisons in their efforts to curry favour with Trump, but it’s not going to benefit anyone else, including shareholders.”

Update: This article was revised to reflect the Chinese naming convention for Guan Heng.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

New York, Dec. 16, 2025 — President Donald Trump on Monday followed through on his threats to sue the BBC over its editing of his remarks on Jan. 6, 2021, for a documentary.

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

“If any ordinary person filed as many frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits as Donald Trump, they’d be sanctioned and placed on a restricted filers list. By my count, Trump has demanded at least $65 billion in damages from media outlets in lawsuits filed since his second term started — almost nine times his current estimated net worth, according to Forbes.

“The U.S. has laws in place to restrict litigation by prisoners, the most powerless people in our society, because of their supposed propensity to file bad faith litigation. Meanwhile, the most powerful man in the world gets away with filing more nonsense lawsuits than practically anyone, incarcerated or otherwise.

“Perhaps the interview edit in question wasn’t the BBC’s best work. The BBC has acknowledged that. But U.S. defamation law is compensatory, not punitive. You don’t get to call out any alleged journalistic blunder and demand $10 billion.

“It’s preposterous for Trump to claim those damages when he won the 2024 election and hasn’t lost a penny because of the BBC’s editing. It’s also absurd for him to claim associating him with January 6 is defamatory after he spent years insisting nothing bad happened that day and then pardoned those involved. And it’s similarly outrageous that his claims are based on supposedly damaging implications of his using the word “fight.” He sells T-shirts with that word on them.

“Putting aside the incoherence of Trump claiming election interference damages for an election he won, his damages theory also concedes that he views the presidency as a personal profit-making venture.

“Fortunately for the BBC, we’ve seen this movie before. Caving to Trump gets you nothing. Plus, Trump’s hand is considerably weaker than in the past — his authoritarian censorship antics are increasingly unpopular. People are tired of his thin-skinned bully tactics. The only way for the BBC to preserve its journalistic integrity is to fight back.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

As of Dec. 15, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented 32 detainments or charges against journalists in the U.S. — 28 of those at immigration-related protests — according to a new report released by the Freedom of Press Foundation (FPF) project this week.

The report notes how, unlike most years, the majority of journalists were released without charges or had them soon dropped, with law enforcement instead focusing on deterring news gathering rather than pursuing charges.

• Read the Tracker's 2025 arrest report

Tracker Senior Reporter Stephanie Sugars, who authored the report, said it was “shocking” to see the sharp increase in the number of journalists released without being charged.

“While perhaps a sign that officers know the journalists cannot be charged as protesters, each detention pulls eyes and ears from often chaotic protest scenes, and that may well be the point,” Sugars said.

For journalist Dave Decker, being arrested at an anti-deportation demonstration in Miami last month and held in custody for more than 30 hours was a way to “put the brakes on press freedom,” he told the Tracker.

“News is only news for a couple of hours, when it’s breaking like that,” Decker said. “I would say that there were no wires out there, there were no local people, there were no stand-ups, no TV, no helicopter. There was none of that there. So I was literally the only journalist out there. They effectively stopped the news from getting out.”

In 2025, more than 30 journalists were detained or charged for doing their jobs.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

Rümeysa Öztürk has been facing deportation for 262 days for co-writing an op-ed the government didn’t like, and journalist Ya’akub Vijandre remains locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over social media posts about issues he reported on. Read on for more on what we’re working on this week.

Stop the gatekeeping. The First Amendment’s for all of us

In the early days of the internet, online news confused analog-era judges, who pondered questions like, “If this is journalism then why are there no ink smudges on my fingers?” These days, First Amendment advocates tend to chuckle when thinking back on that era. But apparently it’s not quite over yet.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Senior Adviser Caitlin Vogus wrote for the Sun-Sentinel about a judge in Florida’s unfortunate ruling that YouTube-based outlet Popcorned Planet can’t avail itself of the state’s reporter’s privilege to oppose a subpoena from actor Blake Lively. The court’s decision would “effectively exclude any independent journalist who publishes using online platforms from relying on the privilege to protect their sources.” If it stands, “vital information will stay buried,” she explained.

And FPF Executive Director Trevor Timm spoke to Columbia Journalism Review about another subpoena from Lively that’s testing whether celebrity blogger Perez Hilton can claim the privilege. “Hilton is gathering information, talking to sources, and publishing things in order to have the public consume them. That fits the definition of a journalist,” Timm explained. As CJR noted, FPF’s U.S. Press Freedom Tracker “was one of the few to highlight the Hilton case.”

It’s not a question of whether Popcorned Planet and Hilton are great journalists or if they pass some editorial purity test. It’s a question of whether the courts will allow litigants to chip away at First Amendment rights that protect all journalists, no matter what platform they use to report or what subjects they cover.

• READ THE OP-ED

Administration is trolling America with its FOIA responses

As The New York Times reported this week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement claimed it has no body-worn camera footage from Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, Illinois, despite a federal judge’s explicit order that agents wear and activate those cameras.

And as The Daily Beast reported, the Department of Homeland Security told FFP’s Daniel Ellsberg Chair on Government Secrecy Lauren Harper that Kristi Noem had no Truth Social Direct messages, despite her millions of followers. Harper requested cabinet officials’ messages in a Freedom of Information Act request after President Donald Trump accidentally publicly posted correspondence with Attorney General Pam Bondi.

As Harper told the Times, “They are trolling citizens and judges … ICE continues to feel increasing impunity and that it has the right to behave as a secret police that’s exempt from accountability.” FPF is, of course, appealing.

• READ THE NYT STORY

Don’t weaken Puerto Rico’s public records law

When the U.S. Navy quietly reactivated Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico earlier this year, some residents saw the promise of new jobs, while others saw it as a painful reminder of past harms from the American military presence on the island.

Puerto Ricans — and Americans everywhere — deserve basic answers about what the military is up to as tensions escalate with Venezuela and whether Puerto Rico’s government is coordinating with the Pentagon and whether their concerns are being taken into account. And of course, there are countless local issues Puerto Ricans are entitled to be informed about.

But at the moment when transparency is most essential, lawmakers are trying to slam the door shut.

• READ MORE

Don’t just take our word for it…

Throughout 2025 we’ve been hosting online events platforming journalists impacted by anti-press policies at the national and local levels, so you can hear directly from the people we hope will benefit from our work.

Read about three of our recent events. This week’s panel features journalists whose reporting is complicated by sources unwilling to come forward due to fear of retaliation. Last week we spoke with journalists about the difficulties of covering the immigration beat during Trump 2.0, and last month we talked about the immigration cases against journalists Sami Hamdi and Ya’akub Vijandre over their support for Palestinian rights (shoutout to our friends at The Dissenter for writing up that event). And there are even more past events on our YouTube channel.

• BROWSE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

WHAT WE'RE READING Chokehold: Donald Trump’s war on free speech and the need for systemic resistance Free Press

In a comprehensive new report, Free Press’s Nora Benavidez analyzes how Trump and his political enablers have sought to undermine and chill the most basic freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

Press freedom advocates sound alarm over Ya’akub Vijandre, stuck for over two months in ICE custody in Georgia WABE

We cannot just accept that “every so often the administration is going to abduct some lawful resident who said something it doesn’t like about Israel or Palestine,” FPF’s Seth Stern told WABE.

Watched, tracked, and targeted: Life in Gaza under Israel’s all-encompassing surveillance regime New York Magazine

A powerful essay by Palestinian journalist Mohammed Mhawish about life in Gaza “under Israel’s all-encompassing surveillance regime.”

​​ICEBlock creator sues Trump administration officials saying they pressured Apple to remove it from the app store CNN

Threatening to punish app stores if they don’t remove apps the government dislikes is unconstitutional. This time it’s ICEBlock, but tomorrow it could be a news app.

Longtime LA radio exec Will Lewis dies; Went to prison in Hearst case My News LA

Many heroes work behind the scenes on press freedom. Will Lewis was one of them. A radio executive who championed public media, he spent 15 days in prison to protect sources. RIP.

‘Heroic excavators of government secrets’ National Security Archive

Congratulations to the indefatigable National Security Archive on 40 years of clawing back the self-serving veil of government secrecy.

From national outlets to college newspapers, reporters are running into the same troubling trend: sources who are afraid to speak to journalists because they worry about retaliation from the federal government.

This fear, and how journalists can respond to it, was the focus of a recent panel discussion hosted by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), the Association of Health Care Journalists, and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Reporters from a range of beats described how the second Trump administration has changed the way people talk to the press, and what journalists do to reassure sources and keep them safe.

For journalist Grace Hussain, a solutions correspondent at Sentient Media, this shift became unmistakable when sources who relied on federal funding suddenly backed out of participating in her reporting. “Their concerns were very legitimate,” Hussain said, “It was possible that their funding could get retracted or withdrawn” for speaking to the press.

When Hussain reached out to other reporters, she found that sources’ reluctance to speak to the press for fear of federal retaliation is an increasingly widespread issue that’s already harming news coverage. “There are a lot of stories that are under-covered, and it’s just getting more difficult at this point to do that sort of coverage with the climate that we’re in,” she said.

Lizzy Lawrence, who covers the Food and Drug Administration for Stat, has seen a different but equally unsettling pattern. Lawrence has found that more government sources want to talk about what’s happening in their agencies, but often only if they’re not named. Since Trump returned to office, she said, many sources “would request only to speak on the condition of anonymity, because of fears of being fired.” As a result, her newsroom is relying more on confidential sources, with strict guardrails, like requiring multiple sources to corroborate information.

For ProPublica reporter Sharon Lerner, who’s covered health and the environment across multiple administrations, the heightened fear is impossible to miss. Some longtime sources have cut off communication with her, including one who told her they were falsely suspected of leaking.

And yet, she added, speaking to the press may be one of the last options left for employees trying to expose wrongdoing. “So many of the avenues for federal employees to seek justice or address retaliation have been shut down,” Lerner said.

This chilling effect extends beyond federal agencies. Emily Spatz, editor-in-chief of Northeastern’s independent student newspaper The Huntington News, described how fear spread among international students after federal agents detained Mahmoud Kahlil and Rümeysa Öztürk. Visa revocations of students at Northeastern only deepened the concern.

Students started asking the newspaper to take down previously published op-eds they worried could put them at risk, a step Spatz took after careful consideration. The newsroom ultimately removed six op-eds but posted a public website documenting each removal to preserve transparency.

Even as the paper worked hard to protect sources, many became reluctant to participate in their reporting. One student, for instance, insisted the newspaper remove a photo showing the back of their head, a method the paper had used specifically to avoid identifying sources.

Harlo Holmes, the chief information security officer and director of digital security at FPF, said these patterns mirror what journalists usually experience under authoritarian regimes, but — until now — have not been seen in the United States. Whistleblowing is a “humongously heroic act,” Holmes said, “and it is not always without its repercussions.”

She urged reporters to adopt rigorous threat-modeling practices and to be transparent with sources about the tools and techniques they use to keep them safe. Whether using SecureDrop, Signal, or other encrypted channels, she said journalists should make it easy for sources to find out how to contact them securely. “A little bit of education goes a long way,” she said.

For more on how journalists are working harder than ever to protect vulnerable sources, watch the full event recording here.