As major news organizations meet with the Department of Justice today to discuss the recent journalist surveillance scandals, it’s vitally important that they press the Attorney General to drop the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. If the case continues, it would render the new press freedom progress worthless.
The Trump administration's Department of Justice secretly obtained the phone and email records of a CNN journalist last year. Senator Wyden has called on the Biden admin to categorically bar the surveillance of journalists in order to root out their sources.
Freedom of the Press Foundation has dedicated a portion of the proceeds from the auction of “Stay Free,” Edward Snowden’s record-breaking NFT artwork, to purchasing carbon offsets to address the emissions associated with the sale. We requested an estimate of the NFT’s output from the decarbonization platform Aerial, and opted for the very top of the estimated range.
Law enforcement officers have photographed the faces or IDs of nearly three dozen journalists in Oregon and Minnesota in recent months, according to new data published by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. These measures don’t appear to serve any law enforcement purpose beyond intimidating reporters who are doing their job.
Department of Justice subpoenas for the phone records of three Washington Post reporters represent an outrageous invasion of the First Amendment rights of journalists to communicate with sources, and the defense of their use by the Biden administration raises alarming questions about its commitment to press freedom.
In the past two months, lawmakers in Florida and New Jersey have advanced misguided proposals that would effectively classify assaults on journalists as hate crimes. These proposals would do little to fix the underlying issues and would likely create a host of new problems.
After a tumultuous 2020 saw unprecedented numbers of journalists arrested and detained, some held hope that police departments would learn from public backlash and change their behavior. In a coordinated crackdown on protests that included the arrest or detention of more than a dozen journalists, the Los Angeles Police Department showed last week that it has done no such thing.
As we come to the end of Sunshine Week — the long-running annual initiative focusing on government transparency — we're taking a look at how the first few months of the Biden administration have shaped up on that front.
Journalists — especially those without institutional newsroom support — rely on tools from major tech companies like Google and YouTube for newsgathering, production and distribution as a matter of course. As these information giants publicly wrestle with controversial content moderation decisions that dominate headlines and Congressional hearings, their decisions also run the risk of stifling routine reporting.
A coalition of two dozen press freedom, civil liberties, and human rights groups call for an immediate end to the prosecution of Julian Assange by Biden's Department of Justice.
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