Here’s a bill sure to give journalists and pesky free speech types the night sweats until a court hopefully slaps it down with the constitutional sledgehammer:
WASHINGTON — Reporters who write about government surveillance could be prosecuted under proposed legislation that would solidify the administration’s eavesdropping authority, according to some legal analysts who are concerned about dramatic changes in U.S. law.
The draft would add to the criminal penalties for anyone who “intentionally discloses information identifying or describing” the Bush administration’s terrorist surveillance program or any other eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law.
Under the boosted penalties, those found guilty could face fines of up to $1 million, 15 years in jail or both.
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the measure is broader than any existing laws. She said, for example, the language does not specify that the information has to be harmful to national security or classified.
“The bill would make it a crime to tell the American people that the president is breaking the law, and the bill could make it a crime for the newspapers to publish that fact,” said Martin, a civil liberties advocate.
DeWine is co-sponsoring the bill with Sens. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. The White House and Republican Senate leaders have indicated general support, but the bill could face changes as it works its way through Congress.
David Tomlin, the AP’s assistant general counsel, said government officials with security clearances would be potential targets under DeWine’s bill.
“But so would anyone else who received an illegal disclosure under the proposed act, knew what it was and deliberately disclosed it to others. That’s what some reporters do, often to great public benefit,” he said.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the language would allow anyone _ “if you read a story in the paper and pass it along to your brother-in-law” _ to be prosecuted.
“As a practical matter, would they use this to try to punish any newspaper or any broadcast? It essentially makes coverage of any of these surveillance programs illegal,” she said. “I’m sorry, that’s just not constitutional.”
The British have similar restrictions on journalists to a much more sweeping extent. Coverage of someone being in trouble for disclosing information the follow-up articles can’t even allude to is as bizarre as you might imagine.
Tracie Troha over at the Daily Press has a good one today, about a new shopping center going up next to I-15 and Main Street.
Speaking on the behalf of Hesperia, I invite everyone to come to our city, barely use our roads, and drop sales tax revenue in the city’s collective piggy bank.
Well, I was on my way out the door to interview the Sultana High School cheerleading team — 1st in the state, two years in a row — when I got a call from Barb Stanton at Talk 960.
She was asking for more information about my article about the Hesperia Unified School District’s response to the Apple Valley child abduction attempts.
It was out of the blue, as sometimes happens in the news. The conversation went something like this:
Barb: Hey, Beau, it’s Barb Stanton!
Beau: Hey, Barb!
Barb: I’m on the air right now — well, we’re on a commercial break — and I wanted to know if you wanted to come on the air and talk about your article in the paper.
Beau: Which article is that?
Barb: The one about these horrible abductions in Apple Valley.
Beau: Oh, right. Yeah, but I’m running out the door to go to this interview …
Barb: It’ll only take a minute.
Beau: All right, Barb. We can do it fast.
Barb: Great.
So, with a minute’s worth of warning, I was back on the radio for the first time in 15 or 16 years. Hopefully I did OK. It helped that I’d just inputted the HUSD police log and was able to talk about relative school safety compared to my high school, South Lakes High School in Reston, VA, and about how kids in the HUSD get citations that add up to real money and that, yes, parents can and will get arrested if they fail to pay these fines.
It went OK, I think. We have a good relationship with Barb over here at the Hesperia Star, but I don’t know that I’m going to let her talk me into being interviewed on the radio as an actual guest. Even I don’t think that I’m that interesting.
The bad news: The Hesperia Star did not win any of the Best of Freedom Awards this year. So no repeat.
The good news: El Mojave, the Hesperia Star’s smaller Latina sister, did win, for a story we can only call Un piano, rosas y un gran amor, since that’s its name.
¡Felicitaciones!
It’s always impossible to know what sort of story will get the most reaction from readers.
In my first month at the Hesperia Star, I wrote a story about a gay church in conservative Hesperia. To this day, not a peep from the readers.
Later, I did a story about a man whose roosters were seized on suspicion that he was raising them for cockfighting. The pro-cockfighting folks from around the country filled my e-mail and voicemail inboxes with outraged responses.
And now, a story about how the Hesperia Unified School District is using early intervention to catch students before they get categorized as learning disabled due to their academic performance and thus having one of the lowest percentages of special education students in the state has had my e-mail inbox swelling to the bursting point again.
This time, though, it’s with positive e-mails, with educators from as far away as Scotland wanting to know more. They saw a link to the story in a weekly news round-up e-mail from the Council for Exceptional Children.
You never can tell.
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