U.S. Waged Secret Legal Battle to Obtain Emails of 4 New York Times Reporters | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Waged Secret Legal Battle to Obtain Emails of 4 New York Times Reporters

nytimes.com

41 pointslobo_tuerto14 comments

  The battle was over an ultimately unsuccessful effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates The Times’s email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.

Good on Google!

The interesting part of the story is that Google fought the order to turn over email records because in their contract to NYTimes they had stipulated they must notify NYtimes of all log requests and the initial order had a gag requirement. Would Google have turned over records if that statement didn’t exist?

I am not anyone’s lawyer but I imagine they would have come up with the next best legal defense if that statement didn’t exist

>the initial order had a gag requirement

I can never wrap my mind around how this construct can even be lawful in a country supposedly governed by the rule of law.

It's like, "Hey, we know we are doing really shady stuff, so we better prevent you from taking legal recourse".

The first half of the piece seems to claim the Biden administration actively continued the case.

Then we get this:

>Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”

Sounds like it just took a while for the new team to get up to speed and kill this. Am I being naive?

> the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view

You don't need to get "up to speed" on this.

You do if you take over and are not aware this is happening by a team levels below you.

It's tricky to move in and quash crooked investigations when you are also trying to be "hands-off" of the Justice Department.

But if the Biden administration wanted to signal their sensitivity to Press freedoms, dropping the Julian Assange extradition and Chelsea Manning harassment campaigns would be clearer.

You are being naive because both sides do this. The DoJ under Obama went after phone records for AP reporters repeatedly.

No government is above this behavior.

The Obama administration was surprisingly and especially authoritarian and anti-press freedom.

>Am I being naive?

Yes.

>Unfortunately, new revelations suggest that the Biden Justice Department not only allowed these disturbing intrusions to continue — it intensified the government‘s attack on First Amendment rights before finally backing down in the face of reporting about its conduct.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/06/fred-ryan...

If you're going to call someone naive, you should say more than just linking to a paywalled article.

If reporters aren't given the legal protection they need to do their jobs then how will they uncover the next big story of national importance like trumps russian collusion or debunk misinformation like the wuhan lab theory.

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