ATS: Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office Seizes Hard Drives From News Organization

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Martin Luther King jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail.

but i guess we can all tell rosa parks she deserved to be arrested because it was the law for her to move to the back of the bus where she was, so when she didnt she had it coming. i guess we have really learned alot from the past....

every law isnt just, nor does it always bring justice. i guess we just need to prosecute all whistle blowers and all who wish to uncover those who do true acts of injustice, the injustices that really do harm to us.

[edit on 15-3-2006 by grimreaper797]

Originally posted by clearmind
we have the war on terror and now the war on the press. seems to me that some govt is getting sick and tired of its dirty laundry becoming public knowledge and is trying to send a message to the press.......

Is the Lancaster a small local press? if so they are just trying to frighten the smaller independents, they allready own the larger outlets.

Originally posted by bubbabuddha
Are police telling truths when speaking to the public and media when reporting crime, or keeping special dossiers on various criminals and crimes secret from the public?

Sometimes they tell the truth, sometimes they don't. It's common to hide some facts about a crime that could only be known by the criminal. In this case, that is the type of information that the newspaper stole and published. Now, many criminal investigations have been jeopardized. The main thing, however, is that the newspaper commited a crime by hacking into restricted gov't computers.

Is this a secret police tactic? Are the police just smashing and grabbing whenever anyone whistleblows? Those actions would actually be criminal.

It's no secret at all, just standard police work. And the police must go by the book when they gather evidence, or else the evidence will be inadmissible in court. It happens every day, court cases being thrown out because the police didn't do everything by the book.

Who knows? But anytime i hear about hard drives being just stolen form somebody becuase they might contain a crime, I think of confiscation of guns becuase they might be used in crimes, or hammers or kitchen knives(England actually proposed this).
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I would think an internal investigation by the police and the paper would be more appropriate, not a hand over of the papers livelihood.

If I have incriminating data on my drive, I can wipe out all tracks of it in five minutes or less. Seizure was necessary.

If i think you might be a criminal do I get to rifle through you closets and file cabinets?

Not without probable cause and the appropriate warrants, which were obtained in this case.

You make a good point about ghosting the drives. That would eliminate the necessity of removing the systems. But it doesn't address the fact that you could still see other, sensitive personal data, which is what the newspaper claimed.

Why is it that people seem to feel that the ends justify the means when it comes to the media? They feel that it is OK for members of the media to break what ever laws they choose in order to obtain information to write their stories. Last time I checked, disclosure of classified or confidential information was a crime. Wait, my bad, it is only a crime if it isn't a reporter doing the disclosing in order to get a story! What happens when that reporter decides that you are the story? When it is your personal information that is being disclosed? Hardly a week goes by that I don't see the press making a story of how some company has failed to safeguard private information wheather it is credit, medical or financial. The website in question is a database of information on various crimes so that other law enforcement agencies may provide information.

If the newspaper was given access to this website, both the person who provided the access and the people who used the information should be prosecuted to the fullest extent that the law will allow. You can't tell me that the people at this newspaper didn't know that they were breaking the law by accessing this site. They flushed what ever protections they had under the First Amendment down the toilet when they did this. As far as there being other information on those hard drives, they should have thought of that before they accessed the site.

I lost what ever little respect that I had for members of the media when I watched a nationally syndicated reporter state that if he had information on the Normandy invasion on June 1st 1944 he would have put that information into a story that day, no matter how many lives it might have cost.

Originally posted by JIMC5499
I lost what ever little respect that I had for members of the media when I watched a nationally syndicated reporter state that if he had information on the Normandy invasion on June 1st 1944 he would have put that information into a story that day, no matter how many lives it might have cost.

The site contained un-released information about local crimes, stuff that only the perp could know. Common police practice, not to release all details of a crime. The newspaper printed some of that info, that's what brought them to the attention of the AG to begin with. But imagine how many criminal cases they jeopardized by printing that info.

Do you mind sharing the name of that reporter? Attitudes like his gets innocent people killed.

Originally posted by jsobecky
Do you mind sharing the name of that reporter? Attitudes like his gets innocent people killed.

I'm going to have to do a little research on who the reporter was. The quote that I am referring to was made in the 1990's during the incident in Somalia. There was actually camera crews waiting on the beach for the Marines when they got there and the issue was raised about the security of that information.

Originally posted by jsobecky
Do you mind sharing the name of that reporter? Attitudes like his gets innocent people killed.

I'm going to have to do a little research on who the reporter was. The quote that I am referring to was made in the 1990's during the incident in Somalia. There was actually camera crews waiting on the beach for the Marines when they got there and the issue was raised about the security of that information.