When President Joe Biden said “journalism is not a crime” last April, federal prosecutors in Tampa, Florida, apparently took that as a challenge. Not a crime yet.
The next month, FBI agents raided the home of journalist Tim Burke. He is scheduled to be arraigned in the coming weeks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and wiretap laws for finding and disseminating unaired Fox News footage of Kanye West’s antisemitic rant to Tucker Carlson. The indictment doesn’t accuse Burke of hacking or deceit. Instead, its theory is that he didn’t have permission to access the video, even though it was at a public, unencrypted URL that he found using publicly posted demo credentials.
But finding things that the powerful don’t want found is essentially the definition of investigative journalism—which, as Biden said, is not criminal in this country.
A recent court filing heightens concerns about whether prosecutors hid from the judge who authorized the raid that Burke was a journalist. By doing so, they may have avoided scrutiny of whether their investigation—and eventual indictment—of Burke complied with the First Amendment, federal law, and the Department of Justice’s own policies.
Yeah. If we can say it’s relevant when their videos got stolen that the video distribution site had very poor OPSEC, I think we can say it’s relevant when he gets prosecuted that this guy had pretty poor journalistic OPSEC.
Use Tor. Download videos. Hey buddy where’d you get the videos? From a source, a journalistic source I’m not divulging, GFY, if you think something bad happened then prove it.
(I’m sitting in judgment when I don’t really know; for all I know he did everything right and his lawyer decided that this would be the best tack to take to defend the case, just to lay out what happened and argue that it wasn’t a crime.)
To me it sounds like they should be going after LiveU for not properly securing their videos, and going after the journalist is retribution. But that would also require the government to acknowledge that their own security isn’t a joke.
(It would also require them to stop supporting fascists, which America is seemingly unable to do)