Politics

We wrote recently about the FBI’s pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was not accused of any crime. She was not the target of any investigation. The FBI told her that much while they were busy carting away basically everything she uses to do her job.

The raid was connected to the prosecution of Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a government contractor charged with retaining classified information. The DOJ wanted to rummage through a journalist’s entire digital life to find evidence against someone else. And they got a warrant to do it by, among other things, simply never mentioning to the magistrate judge that there’s a federal law—the Privacy Protection Act of 1980—that exists specifically to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening.

Last week, at a hearing on the Washington Post’s motion to get the devices back, Magistrate Judge William Porter let the DOJ attorneys have it. And then on Tuesday, he issued his ruling, blocking the government from searching Natanson’s devices and rescinding the portion of the warrant that would have let them do so.