There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.

That the Department undertook this unprecedented step without providing any notice to the AP, and without taking any steps to narrow the scope of its subpoenas to matters actually relevant to an ongoing investigation, is particularly troubling.

The sheer volume of records obtained, most of which can have no plausible connection to any ongoing investigation, indicates, at a minimum, that this effort did not comply with 28 C.F.R. §50.10 and should therefore never have been undertaken in the first place. The regulations require that, in all cases and without exception, a subpoena for a reporter’s telephone toll records must be “as narrowly drawn as possible.’’ This plainly did not happen

There should be reasonable ground to believe that a crime has been committed and that the information sought is essential to the successful investigation of that crime. The subpoena should be as narrowly drawn as possible; it should be directed at relevant information regarding a limited subject matter and should cover a reasonably limited time period. In addition, prior to seeking the Attorney General's authorization, the government should have pursued all reasonable alternative investigation steps as required by paragraph (b) of this section.

Every journalist I've spoken to since 2006 uses Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder. Funnily enough, there's a distinct lack of donations to the Wikimedia Foundation from newspapers and media organisations. How much did the New York Times donate in the fundraiser?

We do this stuff for everyone to use and reuse. Journalists taking full advantage of this is absolutely fine. But claiming we should then pay the papers for the privilege is just a little odious.

Forget the fact that pavement-pounding reporting is a form of aggregation from the public - newspapers actively aggregate from tonnes of published sources too. Every newsroom has a table covered in copies of every other newspaper in town - in case you missed something, or they got an angle you didn't, or you think one of the stories can be taken further. In addition to reporting, all journalists do research: they look up other articles on the topic, find past magazine interviews and pull data from published reports. Many science articles in newspapers are just summaries of journal articles.

And that's just what went on and still goes on in the traditional media ecosystem, amongst the old players. Newspapers actively aggregate from blogs too. Every journalist in entertainment or technology starts his morning looking for leads on blogs, and the first thing any reporter does when they get an assignment on a topic they aren't familiar with is look it up on Wikipedia.

"There's going to be something we're going to miss in journalism that will be very regrettable. I hope the young people who have developed Facebook and Google will say, 'We need to fix the information system and we need to get information to people that's well-researched and investigated.' "

"Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat, didn't have a Facebook account. He wouldn't have had one. The news of Watergate came from human beings who were reluctant to talk. And the information was not on the Internet. You talk to college students and they say, 'Instead of two years before Nixon resigned, it would have happened in a week.' And I say, 'Why?' And they say, 'Because, people would have gone to the Internet and found it.' But I say, 'It wasn't there. Even if there was an Internet, the information would not be available.'"

Although there have been other public controversies over subpoenas -- real and threatened -- to reporters in recent years, there have been few, if any, cases in which it has been documented that federal prosecutors obtained the bank records and credit reports of journalists.

1. Many (though, certainly not all) old school journalists come from an era in which they want to hoard the information, and dribble it out, because that's how journalism used to be. The power was in those who held the information, and the journalist's role was to just give you what s/he felt you needed, rather than giving you the full download to analyze yourself.
2. The NY Times and others then uses copyright law as a crutch to explain why they don't provide source material. They hide behind copyright law, claiming that it opens up too much liability to post certain documents that may be covered by copyright.

The one big thing I learned from talking to Samson is that when NYT journalists talk about copyright constraints preventing them from putting documents online, they're not particularly upset about that. In fact, they might secretly be quite happy that there's no question of posting the document they spent so much effort obtaining. Journalists are human, after all, and can be quite jealous and competitive: they don't want to simply give the story, on a plate, to their competitors, and will happily sit on documents rather than publishing them if they're given half a chance to do so. Samson said he couldn't think of a single instance where a journalist was begging him to be able to publish something and he said no, for copyright reasons.

After all, it's easy for the NYT to post copyrighted documents if it's so inclined -- it just needs to send them to any one of dozens of organizations who will happily put them online, and then link or embed the document into the story. Or the journalist can just ask their source to go ahead and post the document online, in some anonymous place where it can be linked to or embedded. But that never seems to happen. And even when there's no copyright at all, as in the case of the Hank Paulson ethics waiver, the NYT went on the record as saying that the reporters "would probably be uncomfortable simply handing over documents" even to one of their colleagues, let alone to the world in general. After all, said Tim O'Brien, an editor there, "they had spent a lot of time and energy to find, analyze, and report on" that document.

"We want our readers to respect intellectual property," says Samson. "Intellectual property is arguably the biggest asset of this company. We value others' IP rights, and we want their IP rights to be respected."

The Court reiterates that freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society and that, in that context, the safeguards guaranteed to the press are particularly important. Furthermore, protection of journalistic sources is one of the basic conditions for press freedom. Without such protection, sources may be deterred from assisting the press in informing the public on matters of public interest. As a result, the vital "public watchdog" role of the press may be undermined and the ability of the press to provide accurate and reliable reporting may be adversely affected. Having regard to the importance of the protection of journalistic sources for press freedom in a democratic society and the potentially chilling effect that an order for disclosure of a source has on the exercise of that freedom, such a measure cannot be compatible with Article 10 unless it is justified by an overriding requirement in the public interest.

"then everyone is a journalist and the privilege becomes meaningless."

"Why would a guy put all this stuff on a blog? Does he have nothing better to do?" Locasio asked. "Does he get paid?"