The Justice Department could not search through the contents of a number of devices investigators seized from a Washington Post reporter earlier this yr as part of a probe into leaked categorised paperwork, a federal decide in Virginia dominated Tuesday.
The resolution from Magistrate Judge William Porter is a outstanding flip of occasions some six weeks after he first gave the federal government permission to raid the reporter’s house to grab a cellphone, two computer systems and a Garmin watch.
In a 22-page ruling laying naked the decide’s issues that investigators would use the search warrant he accepted to see into elements of the reporter’s knowledge which might be unrelated to the leak investigation, Porter stated that giving them carte blanche to rummage through all of the information it seized “when probable cause exists for only a narrow subset … would authorize an unlawful general warrant.”
“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” he wrote.
Porter rejected separate requests from the reporter, Hannah Natanson, and prosecutors to look through the devices and filter out data that’s not topic to the search warrant, as an alternative tasking the courtroom with that duty.
“To gather the information the government needs to prosecute its criminal case without authorizing an unrestrained search … the court will conduct the review itself,” he wrote.
NCS has beforehand reported that Natanson shouldn’t be below investigation. But her communications with a authorities contractor who was charged with illegally leaking categorised data are what led prosecutors to ask Porter to approve a search warrant for her Virginia house earlier this yr.
The contractor, Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, pleaded not responsible late final month to 5 counts of unlawfully transmitting nationwide protection data to Natanson through an encrypted messaging software and a single depend of unlawfully retaining the protection data.
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