What always comes to mind is the police busting into the news room of The Guardian in the UK after the Snowden revelations, demanding that computers be destoryed. That's something we'd expect out of Iran or China, but it seems increasingly common in the West.
I'm thankful to live in a country with a codified freedom of the press.
Trust me, the last thing the Australian media wants is the first amendment.
They want freedom of the press.
The general mood in the media at the time the ball got rolling for these sorts of laws was that they were some sort of protected species who shouldn't be subject to them...just the general population. Some looked as though they were advertising their perceived sense of self importance and potential value to the governments of the time.
Sorry if this sounded a bit snarky, I didn't mean it to be, it's just that we should have been talking about this much much earlier than today, yet no-one wanted to until now.
There is a cycle where thing X is scary and everyone gets worked up about it, and the politicians are given a free pass to sidestep the Bill of Rights.
Thing X might be drugs, or might be guns, and the laws might have those things in their title. But the laws are never really about thing X, they are about trampling the Bill of Rights. Aside: the biggest myth is that the gun debate is about the Second Amendment. The proposed (and sometimes enacte) laws violate some combination of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 9th, and 10th Amendments.