Editorial: Raid on Kansas newspaper was possibly illegal — and definitely troubling

It was the sort of conduct one usually associates with totalitarian governments: Law enforcement officers swarm a newspaper office and confiscate computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. The searches left the small news operation in such a dire state that it was not clear whether it would be able to publish the next scheduled edition Tuesday evening; Meyer memorably described the police action as “an atomic flyswatter.” It may also have been illegal. The law broadly defines who is protected: those “reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication.” The law does contain an exception for situations in which “there is probable cause to believe that the person possessing such materials has committed or is committing the criminal offense to which the materials relate.” In a statement to NPR, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody pointed to this exception to justify his department’s search of the Record. Opinion Editorial: In San Francisco, police target a journalist — and flout the law It isn’t just journalists who should be outraged over what happened to freelance videographer Bryan Carmody in San Francisco last Friday: Police handcuffed him while they searched his home in an apparent bid to identify a confidential source. In a letter to Cody signed by the Los Angeles Times and more than 30 other news organizations, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted that the suspect exception cited by the chief “is inapplicable when the relevant conduct consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of the material, with only limited exceptions for certain federal statutes that are not at issue here.” These searches took place in a small town, but the temptation of law enforcement to overreach in dealing with journalists exists in communities of all sizes.