Freedom of the Press

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, where we attempt to document virtually every press freedom violation in the country, has, for some time, made available its database of thousands of incidents for export via the API. We want all the data we’ve collected over the past five years to be available to journalists, advocates, and policy makers for their own analysis.

As an organization committed to helping journalists resist censorship and ensure information remains free, we’ve recently been exploring how we can use the decentralized web, and in particular IPFS, to more permanently store the vast wealth of information now on the Tracker. IPFS, for the uninitiated, is an innovative means to distribute data in a way that doesn’t depend on centralized infrastructure (such as a website).

In some ways similar to torrents, files shared on the IPFS network are mirrored among many nodes. This makes it a protocol particularly resistant to censorship or deletion, and may have other qualities significant to journalists as the internet evolves over time.

To this end, as a proof of concept, we’ve now published the Press Freedom Tracker’s incident database on IFPS. (You can, of course, still use the website API as well). You can view the database at this IPNS ID:

ipns://k51qzi5uqu5dlnwjrnyyd6sl2i729d8qjv1bchfqpmgfeu8jn1w1p4q9x9uqit

You can view the ID via an IPFS web gateway, such as the one provided by Cloudflare, via a browser extension like IPFS Companion, or via another IPFS client. The file is updated about every hour (more on that below), so you can ensure that the dataset you are downloading is the most current.

US Press Freedom Tracker data via IPFS, as viewed in Brave Browser.

A technical deep-dive into IPFS, IPNS, and keeping track of changes to the database

IPFS is an interesting protocol because its content identifiers (CIDs) or ‘hashes’ are cryptographically computed from the content of the file, not its name or other metadata.

This means that every time the file’s content changes, publishing it in IPFS gets a new CID.

There is nothing in the protocol that maintains any sort of ‘revision’ relationship between the old CID and the new one. It is up to the publisher to keep track of old versions of the file (if that’s important to them). Equally, it’s up to the publisher to tell people which CID is the new one, but it would be annoying to have to keep announcing new CIDs every time the file changes.

For this reason, the ID above is an ‘IPNS’ ID, which always points to the latest version of the folder and its contents, without itself ever having to change. IPNS is a little bit like DNS, in that it’s a sort of static ‘alias’ or pointer to another destination - in this case, the latest IPFS CID of the directory.

To maintain a sort of ‘revision’ log of changes to the incidents.csv database (and when it changed), we also publish a changelog file (incidents-log.csv) which shows the previous CIDs and a timestamp of when they were published. The last line in the file is always the latest version of the incidents.csv. You can also fetch the latest file directly (rather than view the directory) by using the IPNS hash, for example:

ipns://k51qzi5uqu5dlnwjrnyyd6sl2i729d8qjv1bchfqpmgfeu8jn1w1p4q9x9uqit/incidents.csv

Feel free to look at older CIDs to see the difference, or to consult the file to find out when the latest version was published.

How often is the data published to IPFS?

We attempt to publish the latest copy of the database to IPFS every hour, but realistically the database itself changes far less frequently. The database is only published (and the changelog updated) if its content changes.

Care to share some code?

We initially tried to use what seems to be the official Python library for working with the IPFS API, but found that it doesn’t seem to support the most recent releases of go-ipfs, and is possibly semi-abandoned.

Fortunately, the go-ipfs service provides its own HTTP RPC API, so we could use Python’s requests module to talk to it.

Publishing a single file to the IPFS API is quite easy, and there are simple examples of how to do it. However, it turns out that publishing a directory containing files was a little more tricky to achieve.

It took a bit of trial and error to work out how to send multiple files in a multipart request with the right tuple values per file, in a way that matched the IPFS API’s documentation, but we got there.

For those curious, here’s a sample of what worked for us. Happy hacking!

If you’re looking to install IPFS on a Linux server, we used an Ansible role for that, which worked great.

With a reporter surveillance scandal of its own embroiling Biden’s Department of Justice, it’s now more important than ever for his administration to throw its weight behind passing a strong journalist shield law, such as Senator Ron Wyden’s PRESS Act.

In the last week, the public learned that the DOJ secretly issued a subpoena seeking phone record information of Guardian journalist Stephanie Kirchgaessner in the course of a leak investigation by the Office of Inspector General, according to a report obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by reporter Jason Leopold. Subsequent reporting has revealed that the subpoena was issued in February of 2021, in the early days of the Biden administration.

Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner described the secret subpoena as “an egregious example of infringement on press freedom and public interest journalism by the US Department of Justice.” We agree — and it’s not an isolated incident.

This revelation follows a series of scandals surrounding the surveillance of journalists in the waning months of the Trump administration, which weren’t disclosed until May 2021 — nearly a year later. In the following weeks and months, the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland introduced new, stronger guidelines purporting to further restrict the Department’s surveillance powers with regard to journalists. At the same time, the White House and Garland called for legislation to codify these new guidelines — a proposal Freedom of the Press Foundation endorsed.

But as we reported this February, the Department of Justice has taken no action to support any such legislation since, leading Senator Wyden’s office to issue harsh criticism of the administration’s silence.

The difference between DOJ media guidelines and an actual law like the one proposed by Wyden’s PRESS Act is significant, in terms of both clarity and effectiveness. As it stands, the DOJ’s Inspector General could argue that the new media guidelines do not apply to them. Other federal agencies, like DHS, which also recently faced a spying-on-journalists scandal, could claim the policy doesn’t apply to them either. As we explained when the guidelines were adopted, action from Congress is vital for the policy to have any teeth.

The Biden administration has repeatedly sought to distinguish itself from its predecessors in terms of its respect for press freedom; making gains that can be undone at the stroke of a pen is insufficient. Unfortunately, as with the Biden DOJ’s decision to continue pursuing charges against Julian Assange, this new fact pattern reveals a disappointing continuity that challenges the press-friendly image this White House has aimed to cultivate.

The best time for the Biden White House to take meaningful action to support the PRESS Act would have been upon its introduction. Failing that, the next best time is now.

Making electronic documents safer to work with

Freedom of the Press Foundation is now the official home of Dangerzone, an open source tool developed by Micah Lee at First Look Media to make it safer for journalists to work with electronic documents sent to them by sources.

Hackers who target individual journalists or entire newsrooms often try to exploit security bugs in apps used to open common file types like PDFs or Word documents. What looks like a promising news tip may in fact be a carefully orchestrated attack. Dangerzone takes documents in many formats and converts them to safe PDF files.

“It’s almost like printing the document and then scanning it back in again,” said Lee. What remains is the same content displayed on your screen — nothing less and, crucially, nothing more.

Dangerzone takes potentially dangerous PDFs, office documents, or images and converts them to safe PDFs.

Lee, who served on FPF’s board of directors until last year, will continue to be the project’s lead developer. As part of stewarding development of the project, FPF is hiring a part-time developer to make long-awaited improvements, such as batch processing documents. Based on feedback from journalists and other newsroom staff, FPF will make further investments in the project.

With SecureDrop, FPF already manages the development of an open source whistleblower submission platform. Trevor Timm, FPF’s executive director, said the continued development and application of Dangerzone is the next logical step in defending public-interest journalism. “What happens after you receive a document? That’s where Dangerzone comes in. We’re honored to play a role in improving it, to protect journalists and sources alike,” Timm said.

You can download Dangerzone at https://dangerzone.rocks/.

In the week since Politico dropped its blockbuster reporting on a draft Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the floodgates of leaks have opened. Just today, Politico has reported on more confidential information regarding the status of that opinion, and at least The Washington Post and CNN appear to have anonymous sourcing close to the court.

These leaks, and the reporting they enable, are a good thing. The journalism we’ve seen on this important issue affecting the rights of hundreds of millions of Americans is a critical public service. Nevertheless, in the past week many political commentators have turned their attention to the leak itself and the perceived transgression from long-standing norms that it represents. One outlet memorably called the leak “the gravest, most unforgivable sin.”

These attacks on the leaks are nonsense. We've come to expect criticism of reporters who have unearthed sensitive or embarrassing information that is nonetheless newsworthy; it's no better to go after the source who provided those facts.

Others have argued that point vociferously in the past week. Matt Pearce at the Los Angeles Times has called for more leaks from the Supreme Court, while Jay Willis at the Supreme Court-focused publication Balls and Strikes has gone so far as to provide his Signal information for would-be leakers. At New York Magazine David Klion argues that even without the “who” and the “why” of the leak, we can describe it as a public service and “good, actually,” and at Politico, the outlet that kicked off this firestorm, Jack Shafer defended the leak and condemned the “veil of secrecy” that hangs over the deliberations from the highest court in the land.

In a sense, most of the arguments about the identity of the source behind these “unprecedented” leaks are a sideshow. (And in fact, leaks from the Supreme Court have happened before and already many times since!) This is not a whodunit story, but a significant legal development that could mean the restriction of long-established rights for hundreds of millions of Americans, with dangerous or lethal consequences. Ultimately, the story has informed the public of a consequential government decision of historic importance. That is what journalism is supposed to do.

We don't yet know — and indeed, may never know — the identity of the original leaker, or what motivated their disclosure. But the focus on their identity misses the point. We do know that in subsequent reporting, the pace of new reporting from inside the court has grown. And despite the hand-wringing from conservative commentators, at least some of the anonymous sourcing is coming from the political right.

For example, the Post has spoken with unnamed “conservatives close to the court” — apparently close enough to provide an account of a private conference among the justices. That account echoes earlier discussions on the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page.

There's no ideological purity test for sources, nor should there be. Leakers, whistleblowers, and other sources frequently come with baggage or “impure” motivations for their disclosures. The job of the journalist is to distill the newsworthy information into a reported story.

Whether the leaker in this case was a liberal frustrated with the direction of the court, a conservative aiming to discipline a majority into holding together, or somebody else entirely, the reporters have an opportunity and a duty to report the facts they can provide.

As frequent Supreme Court litigator Theodore Boutrous put it, “Reporters have the right and indeed an obligation to try to get secret information from every branch of the government and the First Amendment protects their efforts to do so.”

The Supreme Court is a tremendously powerful and influential institution, and yet it has largely resisted the same forces toward transparency that have affected large parts of the executive and legislative branches. The people bound by its rulings deserve to know how it works.

The Los Angeles County sheriff’s public threat of retaliatory investigation into a reporter is an outrageous press freedom violation, and Freedom of the Press Foundation has joined more than two dozen groups last week in a letter condemning that action.

Sheriff Alex Villanueva, in a press conference on April 25, repeatedly pointed to a photo of Los Angeles Times reporter Alene Tchekmedyian and included her among the subjects of a criminal probe. Tchekmedyian reported on a leaked video showing a sheriff’s deputy kneeling on the head of a handcuffed inmate, and an apparent cover-up effort subsequently by Villanueva’s office.

After a public backlash from the Times and media and press freedom groups around the country, Villanueva has backpedaled on the actual investigation. The sheriff described the backlash as an “incredible frenzy of misinformation” in a tweet that included an image from the press conference cropped to remove the screen that displayed the reporter’s face. Still, as we explain in the letter, the very threat constitutes an unacceptable chilling effect:

Even where no charges are ultimately brought, the hostile signal sent by these incidents can have a chilling effect on newsgathering in Los Angeles and thus on the flow of information to the public your office serves. And your rhetoric sharpens, too, the acute physical risks that already face journalists engaged in on-the-ground reporting about law enforcement. See Kirstin McCudden, Another Record Year for Press Freedom Violations in the U.S., U.S. Press Freedom Tracker (Jan 10, 2022), https://perma.cc/HTD8-V759. We urge you to change course and take steps to ensure that reporters’ basic rights are given due respect at every level of the Department—from the deputy on the beat to the office of the Sheriff.

We’ve previously written about the shocking and shameful behavior of Los Angeles police, including the Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, and several other law enforcement agencies in the area, when it comes to press freedom issues.

Read the full letter, organized by the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press and signed by FPF and 30 other organizations, below.

Freedom of the Press Foundation is thrilled to announce a new membership program to bring our community together in a world where press freedom is under constant threat. More than just a donation for a T-shirt, our membership program offers an opportunity for journalists, whistleblowers, experts and supporters to connect in new and dynamic ways in support of public-interest journalism.

Members who sign up by Tuesday, May 3 — World Press Freedom Day — will receive an invitation to a members-only event to hear from Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower, First Amendment advocate, and co-founder of FPF. He’ll discuss leaks both past and present and how we can support the ongoing fight for press freedom. Details of this exclusive event will be shared with members via email after sign-up.

Members will also gain access to other exclusive FPF events. From remote digital security trainings to tailored seminars led by experts in privacy and technology, FPF has designed a program that encourages members to better arm themselves in the fight for press freedom.

“The membership program is a wonderful opportunity for us all to come together to do more for press freedom,” said Louise Black, FPF’s Vice President of Development and Operations. “I look forward to engaging with our community like never before. It’s thanks to our loyal supporters that we’re able to accomplish all that we do.”

Check out our new membership page to learn more about becoming a member today.

As a thank you for joining the program, members will receive newly designed FPF merchandise so they can wear their commitment to press freedom in style. Membership gifts include exclusive items like:

• Membership Cards
• Webcam privacy stickers
• FPF T-shirts
• FPF Emergency whistles
• FPF Tote bags
• FPF Sweatshirts (crewneck and hoodie options available)

Other FPF shirts, face masks, mugs, stickers and SecureDrop items are also available for direct purchase in our new store.

Your membership will directly support our mission to protect, defend, and empower public interest journalism in the 21st century. On behalf of FPF, we thank you for joining our community and we are excited to blow our whistles with you! Should you ever have questions or concerns, please feel free to contact membership@freedom.press.

FPF is a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and our tax ID number is 46-0967274. Your donation is tax-deductible to the full extent provided by law, less the value of any substantial gifts received.

New York City Hall is out of line in demanding information about the criminal backgrounds and open cases of journalists applying for press credentials.

Freedom of the Press Foundation was among the chorus of voices calling for press credentialing authority to be removed from the New York Police Department in 2020. That necessary change was passed by New York's City Council last year, moving the authority to the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

But the mayor's office, now tasked with this role, has imposed new and unjustified hurdles in the process, a practice reported last week by New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. The rule for the first time requires applicants to provide information about felony convictions or any “open case for a lawful arrest for a misdemeanor while newsgathering.”

That last line is especially egregious, given that our call for a revamped press credentialing process followed well-documented incidents of journalists being improperly arrested at protests. According to our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, 13 journalists have been arrested or detained while reporting in New York City since 2020.

City Hall reportedly emphasized to Intelligencer that the rules were implemented before Mayor Eric Adams took office in January. Regardless, this is Adams’ mess to clean up. And people will be watching especially closely, given his longstanding ties to the NYPD. (Adams was a New York City police officer for more than two decades before beginning his political career.)

Moving the press credentialing away from the police was a necessary step, but ensuring that the process is conducted fairly and with appropriate respect for press freedom requires more. As a key stakeholder in the lawmaking process put it, this implementation goes against the intent of the lawmakers who fought to move the credentialing process:

Keith Powers, the council member who sponsored the law, said he was caught by surprise by how [the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment] interpreted its new authority. “I was not aware of this rule in the application process, and think it should be removed to uphold the intention of Local Law 46,” he said in a statement.

Others have threatened to take the mayor's office to court over this new guideline. We urge the agency to do the right thing and remove these criteria from their application.

In an important ruling for the press’s ability to report freely on the work of other outlets, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that including a screenshot in an article commenting on another article's reporting is not copyright infringement. This is welcome news in an age where copyright can be used to restrict what newspapers can and can’t say about each other.

The article in question, a 2017 New York Post piece titled "Why I won't date hot women anymore," described three vignettes from people who had supposedly sworn off the very attractive. The leading anecdote concerned a 40-year-old private equity executive who, post-epiphany, had become engaged to a "merely beautiful" woman. The article was illustrated with a photograph of the exec that ran at the top of the story. Mic Network, a media company, reported on the backlash that the article had received and incorporated a screenshot that included part of that photograph.

Photographer Stephen Yang sued Mic for copyright infringement, and Mic moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that its inclusion qualified as a fair use — meaning, not copyright infringement. The Southern District of New York agreed, providing a fair use analysis that came to the conclusion that the purpose and character of Mic's use was clearly “transformative” and used to identify and provide commentary on the underlying article. (Whether a use is “transformative,” and how much that should affect the analysis, has been the subject of lots of legal analysis, including in a case headed to the Supreme Court in the next term. In this case, the court didn’t get bogged down in the details.)

Yang appealed, arguing that because his photograph was not the target of criticism, the use wasn't fair — an argument the Second Circuit has now rejected. That's an important win for the press and its ability to report on the media itself — in part, because copyright has long been one of the levers of control that the subjects of news stories use to exert influence over how they may be covered.

Notably, before the Hulk Hogan case in state court that ultimately bankrupted Gawker, the former wrestler and his attorney Charles Harder filed a federal lawsuit for copyright infringement over the same video that formed the basis of the later suit. And in just the past several years, a guest at Donald Trump’s private golf club sued outlets making use of his photos to report on the newsworthy actions of the then-president.

Photographs in particular have become recognized as a source of potential liability for news outlets who could face ruinous damages at worst, or expensive and stressful litigation at best. That sense has been heightened by an unusual ruling also in the Southern District of New York, finding that embedding a photo directly from a social media post could possibly constitute copyright infringement. (After that ruling, the parties settled out of court, which meant the Second Circuit did not get a chance to weigh in on an appeal.) One consequence of this uncertainty is that, likely in an effort to limit their possible exposure to lawsuits, some sites have taken to removing images from their archives en masse.

As we’ve long argued, news reporting relies on fair use. The actual practice of fair use, in turn, relies on firmly established principles and precedents that can ward off litigation — or at least limit its scope. Although it’s unfortunate that the current case has dragged on for nearly four years, its unambiguous result in Mic’s favor may discourage other plaintiffs from following suit.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asks a question of Director of the DOJ Office of Information Policy, Bobak Talebian.

Senators from both sides of the aisle took representatives from the executive branch to task at a Judiciary Committee Freedom of Information Act hearing this week. At the first hearing on FOIA since 2018, lawmakers raised serious issues with compliance and backlogs that have ballooned since the COVID-19 pandemic started.

FOIA requests as a transparency tool are available to everyone, but they are especially popular for journalists, who can use the responsive records as leads or to provide primary source support for reporting. For a working journalist, the glacial pace of document production found in some government departments is a non-starter — and clearly out of compliance with the text of the law, which requires results in weeks, not months or years.

Questions from senators focused on those long timelines and the resulting backlog, which a Government Accountability Office witness said was up 18% in September 2020 over a year before, after six months of pandemic working conditions. (We wrote in April 2020 about the collapse in government compliance with its transparency obligations as the pandemic began.)

Data journalists also frequently require records that are up-to-date and readily available in a machine-readable format — an issue that was raised by Senator Jon Ossoff, who asked the witnesses about the digitization of record storage and how it affects the government’s ability to produce those records digitally. Ossoff argued that this should be a fundamental consideration, calling it "a basic question about how FOIA is operating in the context of new technology."

Several senators also raised questions about legislative record requests, which have suffered many of the same foot dragging and excuse making as FOIA. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse asked a Department of Justice witness about the agency's position in CREW v. DOJ, an ongoing FOIA case concerning a Justice Department memo on whether President Trump's conduct described in the Mueller Report constituted obstruction of justice.

Whitehouse and a group of six other senators have filed a brief in that case, arguing that the department should not be allowed to withhold the memo. The litigation began during the Trump administration but the Department of Justice has continued to fight the memo's release after President Biden took office.

Senator Ossoff also asked about DOJ guidance on requests from individual lawmakers, which currently are treated differently than requests from committee chairs. That guidance in particular comes from a 1984 memo that, Ossoff suggested, should be revisited. This kind of internal DOJ guidance has major influence on policy and isn’t always even public — the Knight First Amendment Institute has challenged that secrecy for Office of Legal Counsel memos and, through FOIA litigation, has gotten hundreds of such memos released.

The Freedom of Information Act remains a critically important transparency tool — look no further to the stories surfaced by @FOIAFeed every day for evidence of that. But the senators are correct that it needs significant fixes to be a useful and modern one.

Russia has cracked down extensively on independent reporting within its borders since it invaded Ukraine last month, leading many outlets to cease publishing or pull editorial staff from the country entirely. Still, international and independent news outlets that would face official censorship within Russia are finding ways to distribute uncensored news to avid readers.

If you’re a journalist or represent a news org looking to circumvent censorship in Russia, please reach out to Freedom of the Press Foundation — we may be able to help.

In some cases, the solutions are high-tech. BBC and The New York Times, for example, both offer Tor onion services to make an encrypted connection to their site available to anybody with Tor browser access. Providing an onion address offers benefits above simply encouraging Tor usage for news sites, which we’ve explained in the context of tracking onion roll-outs and which security researcher Alec Muffett has recently described in more detail.

Importantly, these outlets didn’t start offering onion addresses with the invasion — rather, they’ve long provided Tor access as one channel to read their reporting, meaning the onion URLs have already been widely distributed and would be harder to substitute with spoofs.

For services that haven’t always been available over Tor, offering a new onion service is still a welcome development. Twitter somewhat quietly rolled out a long-anticipated onion service this month.

Independent news outlets on the ground in Russia may not have the infrastructure to launch an onion service, but Meduza — which long anticipated the ban that was issued against it this month — was able to educate readers about using VPNs or other circumvention techniques to continue accessing the site, and offers a mobile app that has not been as straightforward to restrict. It has continued to produce valuable reporting since the new restrictions and is looking to non-Russian audiences to help fund its continued existence.

Some outlets have embraced the platform Telegram, which is popular in both Russia and Ukraine, to distribute news through designated channels. Last week, The New York Times announced that it would begin offering updates through the app.

In addition to the channels which provide a sort of newsfeed, Telegram is advertised as a secure messenger, though security researchers have long cautioned about some of its security design decisions. Earlier this month EFF provided a guide to harm reduction for users of the app. (For encrypted communication, we recommend Signal and maintain a guide to maximizing its security.)

Finally, some of the censorship-circumvention techniques being practiced in Russia are decidedly much more old-school. This month the BBC revived its regional short-wave radio broadcasts — technology usually more associated with World War II than the Internet age — and is transmitting World Service news into Russia and Ukraine for hours each day.

Russia has long been a dangerous place for independent journalists. But in the past week, President Vladimir Putin’s government has swiftly stamped out any remaining semblance of press freedom, in an attempt to prevent its populace from learning the truth about its brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Almost immediately after tanks started rolling across the Ukrainian border, Russian government authorities reportedly started issuing ominous edicts to newspapers to stop using certain words and phrases in their reporting. Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, who runs the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, told The New Yorker on Feb. 28, “We received an order to ban the use of the words ‘war,’ ‘occupation,’ ‘invasion.’” He continued, “However, we continue to call war war. We are waiting for the consequences.” Many other publications received similar messages.

Putin quickly made these authoritarian “warnings” official policy. As the Washington Post reported, the Russian Parliament passed a new law “banning what it considers ‘fake’ news about the military, including any rhetoric that calls the invasion of Ukraine an “invasion” — the preferred language is “special military operation” — with a potential 15-year prison sentence.”

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, only four days after the invasion began, five journalists were already facing charges “and dozens more were detained across Russia following their coverage of anti-war protests.” An independent newspaper, which put anti-war messages (rough translation: “the madness must be stopped!”) on its front page, found its offices raided by government authorities.

On March 1, two television networks which aired criticism of the invasion were reportedly taken off the air. By March 3, journalists from Dozhd, what CNN described as “the last remaining independent news network in Russia” fled the country over fears of their own safety. "After the blocking of Dozhd's website, Dozhd's social media accounts, and the threat against some employees, it is obvious that the personal safety of some of us is at risk," said Dozhd’s chief.

The so-called fake news law also forced foreign press outlets like CNN to cease broadcasting in Russia. Bloomberg and BBC stated they would suspend all work inside the country. Columbia Journalism Review has more details about the various outlets that have already started evacuating employees or are considering doing so. The New York Times announced on March 8 it is pulling editorial staff still in Russia.

News websites operated by independent news outlets both domestically and abroad were censored on a large scale so that they were unreachable by most of Russia’s population, including Meduza, which is tracking all the sites that have been banned, blocked, or shuttered on its English site.

The broader global information ecosystem has also largely been taken away from Russian citizens looking for accurate information, either by government censorship or companies pulling out of the country voluntarily. As the Times reported:

​​TikTok and Netflix are suspending their services in the country. Facebook has been blocked. Twitter has been partly blocked, and YouTube’s future is in doubt. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco and others have pulled back or withdrawn entirely from Russia. Even online video games like Minecraft are no longer available.

The Putin regime may crack down on the press and the open web in an attempt to momentarily contain the domestic political crisis its invasion of Ukraine has created, but it comes at great cost to the people of Russia. They need truth and independent reporting more than ever.

The Supreme Court upheld and potentially expanded its pernicious “state secrets” privilege in two opinions late last week relating to expansive government surveillance and anti-terrorism programs.

In United States v. Zubaydah, a divided court ruled that the government did not have to disclose information about its torture program at CIA “black sites” to a plaintiff who is currently detained in Guantánamo Bay. In United States v. Fazaga, the court issued a unanimous opinion ruling that a case against the FBI for unlawful surveillance of mosques should not proceed because it could raise national security concerns.

The state secrets privilege, invented in its modern form by the Supreme Court in the 1950s in a case in which it was later shown the government lied, essentially provides a shield to the federal government from accountability in civil courts for any activity it considers “classified.” As EFF has explained, the government often uses the state secrets privilege to argue that even if allegations of law breaking or constitutional violations are true, they are exempt from judicial review.

The issues raised in these particular cases are among the most significant possible constitutional concerns. Secret torture programs and religious discrimination through illegal surveillance are obviously matters of major importance. It’s crucial that they are subject to public scrutiny and examination, and that any misconduct meets appropriate accountability.

In these two decisions, the Supreme Court has effectively eliminated the possibility of that kind of accountability. A dissent by Justice Neil Gorsuch and joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the Zubaydah case lays out the problem eloquently:

In the end, only one argument for dismissing this case at its outset begins to make sense. It has nothing to do with speculation that government agents might accidentally blurt out the word “Poland.” It has nothing to do with the fiction that Zubaydah is free to testify about his experiences as he wishes. It has nothing to do with fears about courts being unable to apply familiar tools to disaggregate discovery regarding some issues (location, foreign nationals) from others (interrogation techniques, treatment, and conditions of confinement). Really, it seems that the government wants this suit dismissed because it hopes to impede the Polish criminal investigation and avoid (or at least delay) further embarrassment for past misdeeds. Perhaps at one level this is easy enough to understand. The facts are hard to face. We know already that our government treated Zubaydah brutally—more than 80 waterboarding sessions, hundreds of hours of live burial, and what it calls “rectal rehydration.” Further evidence along the same lines may lie in the government’s vaults. But as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here. This Court’s duty is to the rule of law and the search for truth. We should not let shame obscure our vision.

Justice Gorsuch describes the Supreme Court searching for truth and being frustrated by the government’s shame. The same dynamic, of course, is apparent when the government goes after whistleblowers who speak to the press, or even the publishers who release that critical information, with threats, condemnations, or even prosecution.

Sometimes those threats are petty, like the governor of Missouri promising prosecution for “hacking” against a journalist who reported on a security issue with the state’s handling of certain personal information. The state was embarrassed, and instead of owning that mistake, an official went after the proximate cause: reporting.

In other cases, the government pursues these grievances to extreme ends. Whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner serve lengthy prison sentences, and Edward Snowden lives in exile facing Espionage Act charges after embarrassing the state.

The state secrets privilege is a specific legal argument that prevents a certain kind of accountability — namely, consideration by a court of law. The impulse that motivates its misuse, though, is much more general. It’s disappointing to see this abuse of power being upheld at the highest levels.

Fifty years ago the federal government tried to prosecute a New York Times journalist for publishing classified information. Since 2018, historians and press freedom advocates have been trying to unseal the mysterious grand jury case, but an appeals court has just ruled it will stay secret — public interest be damned.

Most everyone with an interest in press freedom knows about the seminal First Amendment Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. United States, where then-President Richard Nixon and his administration notoriously attempted — and failed — to censor The New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers.

What many people do not know is that after that Supreme Court ruling, Nixon’s Justice Department also attempted to prosecute Times reporter Neil Sheehan, and potentially others, under the Espionage Act for gathering and publishing the classified study about the Vietnam War that would make up the Times’ legendary investigative series.

Former Times general counsel James C. Goodale recounted the events in 2013, which is one of the only contemporary descriptions of this important but oft-forgotten aspect of press freedom history:

The government's "conspiracy" theory centered around how Sheehan got the Pentagon Papers in the first place. While Daniel Ellsberg had his own copy stored in his apartment in Cambridge, the government believed Ellsberg had given part of the papers to anti-war activists. It apparently theorized further that the activists had talked to Sheehan about publication in the Times, all of which it believed amounted to a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act.

Sheehan's wife, Susan, a reporter for The New Yorker, also was named in the government's case before the grand jury. A Who's Who of Boston-based reporters and anti-war activists were then forced to testify, including New York Times reporter David Halberstam, anti-war activists Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and two senatorial aides to Mike Gravel and Ted Kennedy. Harvard Professor Samuel Popkin would even serve a week in jail for refusing to testify as to his sources, citing the First Amendment right to keep them confidential.

Thankfully, the grand jury failed to bring charges and the DOJ eventually dropped its case. But we largely do not know why, or the full extent of the DOJ’s investigation.

Historian Jill Lepore has been on a years-long legal quest to have documents from this same grand jury investigation unsealed once and for all. For a while it looked like she would succeed. A district court had previously granted at least some of her request. But the First Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling earlier this week, making it uncertain whether the 50+-year-old documents will ever see the light of day. It is a disappointing ruling, one that also flies in the face of precedent in other circuits that says judges can indeed release this type of information to serve the public interest.

This case is particularly important because for the first time since then, the Justice Department is again trying to charge someone with “conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act” related to receiving and publishing classified information. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange currently sits in prison in the United Kingdom, appealing extradition to the United States, where he faces 17 counts under that same law. Virtually every press freedom group in the world has condemned the charges as a threat to press freedom.

Supporters of the Assange prosecution often argue that “the U.S. would never prosecute a real journalist using these tactics.” Well, the Nixon administration attempted to do just that, and it’s vitally important for both the historical record and current events that we see exactly what happened 50 years ago. And use that information to make sure it never happens again.

You can read the full ruling by the First Circuit Court of Appeals via Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, below:

Since the Russian government’s appalling invasion of Ukraine, journalists on the ground have served a critical role for ordinary citizens in the region and around the world learning the full truth of what’s going on.

We join our friends at the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, who have both forcefully written about how journalists must be guaranteed safe haven and not targeted by militaries. Beyond the countless Ukrainian journalists bravely covering the invasion, there are reportedly as many as 1,000 foreign correspondents on the ground.

Two correspondents for the Daily Beast, have already been shot covering the conflict. They are thankfully OK and recovering. But now a television broadcast tower in Kyiv has reportedly been destroyed by a Russian airstrike, and a cameraman was reportedly killed while on the job yesterday. The Russian legislators also plan to criminalize “unofficial” information about the invasion this week. It will likely get worse before it gets better.

CPJ’s coverage, through the lens of press freedom, is particularly comprehensive. It just published an insightful article about “the view from Ukraine, through the eyes of local journalists,” and an alert about all of the journalists detained or threatened inside of Russia for not kowtowing to the government line. According to FT’s Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon, prosecutors are already attempting to ban independent media providers for so-called "calls to extremism" and "publishing false data about Russian soldiers."

Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop, in his always-excellent The Media Today column, has also rounded up some of the tactics the Russian government is using to stifle control its domestic media, including:

According to Meduza, an independent Russian outlet now based in Latvia, Russia’s media regulator this morning ordered news outlets to only report information about Ukraine from official sources, threatening them with fines and censorship if they spread “false information.”

In an incredibly dangerous place for reporters to do their job, press freedom will be critical. The whole world is watching.

An aerial view of downtown Phoenix features the Arizona State Capitol and the House and Senate buildings on either side.

A misguided Arizona bill would make it illegal to take photos or video of the police in certain circumstances, running directly against long-established constitutional protections for such recordings. Freedom of the Press Foundation has joined a coalition of two dozen media and press freedom groups opposing the proposal in a letter embedded below.

The house version of the bill, HB 2319, passed through the legislature's Appropriations Committee on Tuesday and through the full House on Thursday, despite its straightforward First Amendment problems. The House vote came down on party lines, with the body's Republican majority giving approval.

The original proposal would have rendered illegal recordings of police made without permission within 15 feet of an officer; as passed in the House, the limit is eight feet. Either limit is likely unconstitutional, as we explain in the letter:

We are extremely concerned that this language violates not only the free speech and press clauses of the First Amendment, but also runs counter to the “clearly established right” to photograph and record police officers performing their official duties in a public place, cited by all the odd-numbered U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal including the Ninth Circuit. ... It is clear from well-established jurisprudence regarding this matter that officers performing their official duties in a public place do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to being recorded and therefore taking enforcement action against someone who “fails to comply with a verbal warning of a violation of this section” is both impermissible and unconstitutional.

Nevertheless, the proposal now proceeds to the state Senate. We urge the lawmakers in that body to treat the Constitution and its press freedom guarantees with more respect than their colleagues in the House.

The case Sarah Palin lost against The New York Times this week was the first libel claim to even go to trial against the paper in nearly two decades. One might imagine these trials could be a lot more common: after all, the Times publishes constantly and there is no shortage of public figures who love to air complaints about critical reporting.

Some of those complaints even make it into legal claims. The Times was sued for libel in the United States 10 times between 2011 and 2017, for example, though none of those cases went to trial. That actual “close calls” are so rare reflects a critically important precedent in American law — one established by the Times itself.

That precedent, New York Times v. Sullivan, is a cornerstone of American press freedom, a unanimous 1964 Supreme Court decision that recognized the censorious possibility of libel litigation and adopted an appropriately high standard. Thanks to Sullivan, public figures need to show that publishers acted with “actual malice” to win a libel case. In legal terms, the actual malice standard means that the publishers must know the information they’re publishing is false, or act with reckless disregard of whether it’s true or false.

This technique for harassing and punishing a free press — now that it has been shown to be possible — is by no means limited to cases with racial overtones; it can be used in other fields where public feelings may make local as well as out-of-state newspapers easy prey for libel verdict seekers.

In Sullivan, Montgomery police had sued the Times over an ad placed by Martin Luther King Jr. supporters that described how civil rights activists had been treated during protests in Alabama. The Supreme Court recognized, however, that the same silencing tactics could be used in all sorts of cases. As one justice wrote: “This technique for harassing and punishing a free press — now that it has been shown to be possible — is by no means limited to cases with racial overtones; it can be used in other fields where public feelings may make local as well as out-of-state newspapers easy prey for libel verdict seekers.”

In Palin’s case, the Times and its supporters have always conceded that there was a factual error in the editorial in question, and ran a correction the day after its initial publication. Five years into the former governor’s litigation over the issue, the judge announced he would rule for the paper as a matter of law, and the jury ruled for the paper based on the specific facts. Palin, the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president, is very clearly a public figure, and her legal team simply could not show that the newspaper or its editors acted with actual malice towards her.

That high bar has been a critical press freedom protection for decades, and its value may be clearer now than ever. But it has come under unprecedented threat. Politicians — up to the former president of the United States — unhappy with the scrutiny of an independent press, have called for libel laws to be “opened up.” Two Supreme Court justices have suggested the Sullivan standard be revisited.

We’ve also witnessed litigants, bankrolled by billionaires, bringing ruinous suits against media outlets — such as the Florida case that bankrupted Gawker Media in 2016. In the Palin case, the Times likely paid a small fortune in legal fees, despite winning, and is likely to face more costs if Palin appeals. As the most financial stable newspaper in the country, it can afford it; there are countless media outlets that could not.

The intimidation effect of suing even when the Sullivan standard makes winning unlikely is common enough that there’s a name for these kinds of legal claims: a strategic lawsuit against public participation, usually abbreviated SLAPP. In some states, there are anti-SLAPP laws on the books to allow defendants to claim legal fees in cases they win — but these are limited in scope and only apply in those states. Passing a strong federal anti-SLAPP would be a major step forward for press freedom.

Until then, the Sullivan precedent is largely what stands between us and deep-pocketed plaintiffs from replaying the Gawker playbook against other news outlets. Palin’s attempted attack on the precedent should be understood as an effort to bring that grim future closer to reality.

We’re not the only ones to make that observation. Charles Harder, the attorney who led the Peter Thiel-funded team that brought down Gawker, was reportedly in attendance at the trial, taking very detailed notes.

There’s a lot going on in the world, so you’ll be forgiven if you missed the disturbing news last week that the CIA is amassing a significant amount of private data on Americans through a secret surveillance program that the agency is running outside any oversight from either Congress or the courts.

In a letter released Feb. 10, Sens. Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich revealed only the vaguest of contours of the program while demanding the director of national intelligence declassify the details, so that Americans can find out what the CIA has been doing under their name. Many of the specifics, including what types of data the CIA has been collecting on Americans, remain hidden behind a wall of secrecy.

Just two weeks after the director of national intelligence admitted the U.S. classification system is so broken that it hinders our democracy, we learn of yet another mass surveillance program affecting Americans’ rights that has been totally hidden from public view.

The New York Times’s Charlie Savage has an excellent rundown of the scandal. These paragraphs get to the crux of the matter:

In 2015, Congress banned bulk collection of telecommunications metadata under the Patriot Act and limited other types of bulk collection by the F.B.I. under laws governing domestic activities like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

Yet “the C.I.A. has secretly conducted its own bulk program” under Executive Order 12333, the senators wrote.

“It has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection,” the letter continued. “This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress."

Digging deeper, these pieces each explore other important facets of the burgeoning scandal:

• Longtime national security reporter Spencer Ackerman, who was one of the Guardian’s lead reporters during the Snowden disclosures, wrote about how “the CIA has been stealing your data for years.”
• Elizabeth Goitein at Brennan Center, who knows more about surveillance law than just about anyone, wrote a really informative article about “how the CIA is acting outside the law to spy on Americans.”
• Our friends at EFF analyzed many of the aspects of the program we don’t know about, and how outrageous it is that the U.S. government continues to use its classification program to hide potentially illegal programs from any public scrutiny.

We'll have more on this story as it develops.

For journalists covering the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020, there was no more dangerous place to be than Minneapolis. According to our U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, in the span of one week, authorities in the city committed more assaults and more arrests of journalists than in the entirety of 2019.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota State Patrol was finally held accountable for their actions. The ACLU of Minnesota, which represented a class action group of journalists who were attacked and arrested during that time, has come to a historic agreement that was just approved by a judge. The settlement should be a model for other jurisdictions around the country who saw police flagrantly violate the rights of journalists in 2020.

In addition to more than $800,000 in financial compensation for the journalists involved, law enforcement working with MSP and the MSP — under court order — will now be explicitly prohibited from:

• Arresting, threatening to arrest, and/or using physical force or chemical agents against journalists.
• Ordering journalists to stop photographing, recording or observing a protest.
• Making journalists disperse.
• Seizing or intentionally damaging equipment such as photo, audio or video gear.

One of the plaintiffs, Ed Ou, our friend and award-winning photojournalist who was seriously injured by state troopers, said on Twitter after the decision was announced:

“For me, this lawsuit and settlement is bittersweet - because it is… sad that we even needed to do this in the first place. We should have already been protected by the First Amendment, and able to operate without fear of being attacked by security forces for our work. But this is a start, and sends a signal to security forces that they cannot act with impunity, and there are consequences for their actions.

I am grateful to everyone who supported us, and proud to stand with journalists who continue to bear witness and bring truth to light.”

As we have cataloged in the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, more than 140 journalists were arrested around the country in 2020, a nearly 1500% increase on the year prior. More than 600 were assaulted in the same year. In the vast majority of those cases, the perpetrator was law enforcement.

While the issue of press freedom has been elevated to a national level over the past few years, this case is a reminder that it is state and local jurisdictions that have the most power to protect or curtail journalists’ rights. If police departments are not held accountable for arresting reporters exercising their First Amendment rights, or they are not punished for assaulting or shooting projectiles at reporters while they do their jobs, then these actions will only continue.

Tracker senior reporter Stephanie Sugars recently documented that there are currently dozens of lawsuits in progress around the country, brought by journalists who were arrested or assaulted by police officers while covering Black Lives Matters protests in 2020 and 2021.

We hope this settlement will become a model around the country for other journalists seeking accountability, and judges in those cases should take note.

A state appeals court has stayed a prior restraint order in a high-profile case between The New York Times and Project Veritas. For three months, the paper had faced an unconstitutional censorship order unprecedented in modern publishing history. The last time it had been subjected to such a broad gag order was the Pentagon Papers case over fifty years ago.

According to the new ruling, the Times is free to publish documents that had previously been restricted, and will not be forced to turn over or destroy any copies it is holding.

From Freedom of the Press Foundation directory of advocacy Parker Higgins:

It's a relief to finally see this outrageous prior restraint suspended, but frankly it never should have happened in the first place. It violates the fundamental press freedom guarantees in the First Amendment, and the potential precedent would allow plaintiffs to silence coverage and squelch all sorts of reporting. We look forward to the underlying order being thrown out entirely.

Project Veritas, the plaintiff in this case, is currently also the subject of a separate case closely watched by press freedom advocates. That case involves an FBI raid of the homes of several people involved with the conservative group.

Last week, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said out loud what everyone inside the U.S. intelligence community already knows, but rarely will admit in public: the U.S. secrecy system is horribly broken.

"It is my view that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner, be that sharing with our intelligence partners, our oversight bodies, or, when appropriate, with the general public,” Haines wrote in response to an inquiry from Sens. Ron Wyden and Jerry Moran.

Normally, we have to wait for those involved in deploying the classified stamp to leave the government before they admit the obvious. As such, no administration has ever made a meaningful attempt to fix it.

Or perhaps the lack of reform stems from the fact that many of the same government officials who will privately admit the system is broken are also the ones who wield it as both a shield from accountability and a weapon of impunity. Haines is certainly right that overclassification hinders democracy. But the problem is worse than that. Secrecy is killing innocent people — or at least letting those doing the killing get away with it.

Two incidents last week at the White House and State Department are stark reminders on how the secrecy system can be manipulated in ways that can stifle accountability and even lead to war.

On Thursday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki drew well-deserved criticism for implying that an NPR reporter — who was asking skeptical questions about civilian casualties during a Pentagon operation on ISIS — may be more trusting of the terrorist organization than the U.S. government.

That sentiment would be appalling under any circumstances, however it’s particularly galling now, given that just a few months ago — the last time the Biden administration was touting that it killed a terrorist — the victims turned out to be an innocent aid worker and his family. The details of the “righteous” strike were initially classified, and only through dogged investigative reporting by The New York Times was the Pentagon forced to release more information and fess up what really happened.

As we wrote at the time, if such truthful information came from a government official, instead of interviews from Afghani witnesses, that official would be subject to prosecution. Since the Pentagon “investigated” itself, no one was punished for the strike, which killed almost a dozen innocent people, including many children.

The Times followed up its investigation into the tragic Afghanistan drone strike by looking into another battlefield, this one almost wholly hidden from public view: Syria. There, the newspaper focused on a notoriously aggressive U.S. military unit that allegedly had a habit of breaking rules and piling up collateral damage. In one particularly horrific instance, the unit reportedly killed dozens of women and children, and then used the classification system to cover it up.

The same day as the White House incident, veteran Associated Press reporter Matt Lee was grilling State Department spokesman Ned Price after Price alleged Russia was planning a false flag operation on the border with Ukraine, citing classified information of nebulous origins. Lee repeatedly asked for actual evidence of such an extreme claim. After Price responded by insinuating Lee believed the Russian government more than his own, they had this exchange.

Price: "You have been doing this for quite a while —"

Lee: "I have. That's right. And I remember WMDs in Iraq, and I remember that Kabul was not going to fall. I remember a lot of things."

Lee’s retort was a humorous but powerful reminder that many of this country’s major wars, not only Iraq, but Vietnam and others, have started based on lies that were protected via the classification system.

Haines, in her letter, claims that the issue of government secrecy is of “great importance” to President Biden. It’s clear the system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from top to bottom. But maybe they can start with de-classifying the declassification reforms put into last year’s intelligence spending bill. Yes, you read that right – even modest secrecy reform passed by Congress is still secret. Baby steps.