In a growing number of state legislatures across the country, journalists are facing new rules and proposed legislation that breaks with traditions of public access to legislators. These moves are a troubling development in the increasingly rocky relationship between government officials and the press that covers them, and should be rolled back and opposed wherever possible.
Journalists have been working incredibly hard to expose the spyware company and its authoritarian users. But let's not forget about the whistleblowers.
Stop us if you've heard this one before: the NSA failed to follow procedural and policy requirements surrounding the use of surveillance data collected on U.S. persons, according to a new report from the group's Office of the Inspector General.
Sen. Ron Wyden calls the Justice Department’s inaction on key press freedom issue “extremely frustrating, and frankly unacceptable”
The fight to free PACER, the federally managed database of public court records that has sat behind a paywall since its inception, has stretched on for more than a decade now. These efforts may finally pay off in 2022 with a bill poised for the Senate floor that achieves many of the aims of the "free PACER" movement.
Ten years ago, a powerful online activism campaign against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act stopped the bill in its tracks, much to the surprise of the lobbyists and legislators who had considered its passage inevitable. Led by grassroots organizers and civil liberties groups, sites big and small “went dark” for the day in a “blackout” designed to draw attention to the issue and direct calls to Washington.
While we did not see the scope of national social-justice protests of 2020—a year in which journalists were arrested or assaulted on average more than once a day—2021 still outpaced the years before it for press-freedom violations. We systematically capture this data in the US Press Freedom Tracker, where Freedom of the Press Foundation, in partnership with the Committee to Protect Journalists and other press freedom groups, has documented aggressions against journalists in the United States since 2017.
More than 60 journalists have sued police after arrests or assaults at protests, according to new analysis from the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. That total amounts to 82% of the lawsuits filed by journalist or media outlet plaintiffs against public officials.
New reporting into a government operation codenamed "Operation Whistle Pig" describes a shocking level of invasion into the personal and private lives of journalists. In blockbuster reporting, Yahoo News describes the actions of the Counter Network Division, a secretive unit of U.S. Customs and Border Protection that works with law enforcement and the intelligence community.
A UK appeals court has allowed the United States to proceed in its extradition of Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, overturning an earlier ruling that denied prosecutorial efforts based on the inhumane conditions of the American prison system.
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