San Francisco Police Raid Journalist's Home After He Refuses to Name Source | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco Police Raid Journalist's Home After He Refuses to Name Source

npr.org

120 pointsnsnick19 comments

I tweeted @SFPD yesterday my disgust at their behavior. I feel it's all that twitter is good for these days, registering displeasure at companies and agencies. Will they do anything about it? Likely not, but if enough people show anger at them, maybe the Mayor will fire the police chief.

You don't really have leverage through Twitter.

It does create a public paper trail of community sentiment though.

I hate to break it to you, but Twitter is fairly meaningless to almost everyone in the world except a specific type of people in coastal cities.

So is the vast majority of public documents. That being said, having a record of actions, issues and opinions can be quite useful as these records age.

While I agree with this sentiment (and despise “Twitter activists”) https://onemilliontweetmap.com says otherwise

This is telling me that 45 tweets are coming from North Korea.

yeah i don't really understand this. Like why do you need a whole squad and feds to break down his door with a battering ram for a single "leaked" document. Could have just knocked and said they had a warrant.

Police state gotta exercise that power.

There are hundreds to thousands of abuses of law enforcement power like this per year where simple warrant serving is executed by a swat team in order to justify the budget of the swat team.

If you surprise him by suddenly breaking down his door, there's a chance he'll make the wrong gesture. Then you get to kill him saying you felt threatened.

I always found handwritten letters or calls more convincing in an age where everybody says you are a bot, if you are more than one.

You get far fewer angry letters when the barrier for entry is that the writer has to pay for a stamp and an envelope.

The thing about a letter is, you've got 30-90 minutes while you write it to reconsider what you're writing. And if there's a 50p + an envelope + paper cost to that, maybe you think more carefully about what you're trying to say.

With a 500 character limit and a "quick fire, gotta reply fast" push, most interactions are utter crap.

Email (at least to me) is the sort-of-okay middle ground.

Not defending the police, but how do you establish status as a freelance journalist and does that convey protections that California law provides regular journalist, those in the direct employ of a news organization.

by many measures we all are in this day and age. does it require having successfully sold a story to an established news organization?

Is a freelance developer not a developer?

Freelancing is nothing really new. It may be more common.

I agree, in journalism especially it seems to be especially common?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the fact that they sold to well known publication indicates that the material was newsworthy.

I don't agree with raiding a journalist at all (in general), but more importantly I feel the sledge hammer + guns approach is clearly intended to be intimidating and has no place in this kind of warrant. In essence I have more of a problem with the egregious use of weapons and violence on the part of police enforcing a warrant for a non-violent, and non-weapon related crime than I do specifically the attack on journalism.

Obviously the attack on journalism is bad, but in general the intimidation by police is a more widespread problem. Basically the problem for real journalism is the fact that a warrant was issued on a journalist in the first place (think pentagon papers as example of truth to power).

I am a freelance developer, and the reason I am one, is because:

- I said so in the tax office

- I earn money with it

I am quite sure it is not that much different for journalists. As long as you said so at some offical place and earn money with it?

What laws does California have for protecting journalists?

You can't underestimate the danger of a journalist. They're known for accumulating guns and threatening violence.

Oh wait, that's militias

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