Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

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While I've argued in several places that Gizmodo should face the penalty for what they've done (buying stolen property, then taunting Apple with it), this doesn't seem like the right way to go. As Derbyshire points out, it's illegal to seize computers used for journalism, and I would argue that, regardless of the quality of Gawker's work, Jason Chen counts as a journalist. I can only hope the court agrees.

I want to see Gizmodo get penalized for this, but if the choice is between that and ignoring the rights of journalists, it's not worth it.

As Derbyshire points out, it's illegal to seize computers used for journalism

Except that's not a carte blanche shield. If a computer used for journalism was also used to store, say, records of a drug-running ring, would that computer be inviolable? Or seizable, with a warrant, as evidence in the commission of a crime?

This is the crux of the issue. The warrant wasn't issued to determine the source of a trade secrets leak. It was used to procure evidence for the buying and selling of stolen goods. Trade secrets are a civil matter. The fact that the police sought a warrant implies that they're pursuing the criminal case regardless of Gizmodo's publication.

IOW: Running a blog or being a journalist doesn't protect your computers from being impounded when you break the law and happen to also blog about doing so.

The amusing bit is that we all see, and probably laugh at, so many stories of people posting evidence of their crimes on Facebook or YouTube and then being surprised when they're caught. Gizmodo basically did exactly the same thing, but on a far larger scale.

Theft of trade secrets is a criminal matter, actually. Google "Economic Espionage Act of 1996." It may well violate similar CA laws.

>IOW: Running a blog or being a journalist doesn't protect your computers from being impounded when you break the law and happen to also blog about doing so.

Well said. I'm surprised Gizmodo people are making 'I'm a news organization' noises at the moment - it's a flaky excuse, and has little to do with the charges.

I think the biggest problem here is that the source of the leak (the guy who found the phone) is also suspect of selling stolen property (the said phone).

BTW, was it really stolen? It's obviously wrong to sell something you found before doing a reasonable effort to return it to its owner, but where is the line between finding and stealing?

This has been covered elsewhere, but I don't have a current link to it.

Essentially, there is a California law that says if you find something, you're compelled to either return it to its owner, or turn it over to the police if the rightful owner can't be found. So the very fact that he failed to turn it into the police converted it from an act of "finding" to an act of "stealing".

The warrant wasn't issued to determine the source of a trade secrets leak.

Actually...

Appendix B, paragraph 4: 'Printed documents, images, and/or notation pertaining to the sale and/or purchase of the stolen iPhone prototype and/or the sale and/or transfer of trade secret information pertaining to the iPhone prototype.'

I've got extraordinary mixed feelings on this one. On the one hand, people shouldn't feel like it's okay to buy stolen property for their own gain at the expense of the people it was stolen from. But then there's reasonable search and seizure...

Hmm, I don't know, I think I'm going to lean slightly towards stolen-property-bad side of the equation. If the editor wasn't a journalist, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all - if the head of engineering at another company bought a stolen trade-secreted device we'd be calling for his head. Buying obviously stolen property to profit from it is a bad thing and ought to be criminal - should there be exemptions made for doing it for journalism?

> should there be exemptions made for doing it for journalism?

No. That would mean that journalists could steal anything, write a story about it, and not face justice.

Suppose that you became famous for fifteen minutes (this happens to people from time to time: see Susan Boyle, etc.) The exemption you propose would allow the press to enter your home, steal things, and plaster images of you and those things everywhere, without any regard for your rights.

My mum was accused of a climbing up drain pipes to break in to government offices to get documents that led to some important news stories being written.

Apparently the government department in question didn't like the more likely explanation that whistleblowers were handing her brown envelopes full of photocopied papers (which, as it happens, was what was going on).

Thre was talk of her being taken to court to try to compel her to reveal her sources, but the whole scandal resolved itself before then.

> The exemption you propose would allow the press to enter your home, steal things, and plaster images of you and those things everywhere, without any regard for your rights.

It was a rhetorical question, I actually mostly agree with you and see it the same way, just some minor lingering doubt about letting authorities search and seize from people doing journalism. While I think stolen property probably outweights it, I'm still of two minds about it and will think about it over the next couple days as more discussion and commentary comes out.

On the other hand, if you left all of your things abandoned in a bar, and someone working for the journalist picked them up...

I see nothing at all unreasonable about this search and seizure.

<edit>oops, didn't mean to downvote you. Can someone fix that for me?</edit>

I gave an upvote for you.

The triangles are too close; I've also accidentally downvoted someone before.

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