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Peter Scheer

Maybe summoning the press before Parliament isn’t such a bad idea

Peter Scheer December 18, 2013

By Edward Wasserman  Alan Rusbridger, editor of London’s Guardian, faced off with British legislators last week about his newspaper’s publishing secrets about official surveillance that were leaked by the fugitive U.S. intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden. Press advocates weren’t pleased. Carl Bernstein, the Watergate-era star who’s on the Mount Rushmore of 20th century media heroes, certainly wasn’t. In an open letter to Rusbridger, Bernstein objected to Parliament’s “hauling in journalists for questioning and trying to intimidate

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Can a journalist “plead the fifth” to avoid having to name a confidential source? A federal judge say yes.

Peter Scheer December 16, 2013

Several years ago, when journalists by the dozen were being threatened with jail for refusing to name their confidential sources, I wrote an article urging them to invoke the fifth amendment’s protection against self-incrimination–to use the fifth amendment to reinforce the first amendment-based “journalist’s privilege.” This idea hasn’t gotten much traction, until now: a federal judge in Michigan, in a civil suit against the Justice Department, ruled  last month that a journalist could assert his fifth amendment right

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In settlement with FAC, LA County Jail releases inmate visitor log, agrees to relax secrecy rule

Peter Scheer December 5, 2013

SCHEER–As part of a legal settlement with the First Amendment Coalition, the Los Angeles County Jail has agreed to pull back its veil of secrecy on the identities of persons who visit incarcerated public officials. The jail’s prior policy had been to withhold—on grounds of privacy-protection–the names of visitors to all jail inmates. Going forward, the state’s biggest jail will apply a “presumption” of access when the requests (made under the Public Records Act) relate

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NSA may have adhered to legal rules, but legal rules can’t keep up with changes in surveillance technology

Peter Scheer November 24, 2013

A year or two from now, when investigators have taken stock of all the revelations in the NSA records released by Edward Snowden, the verdict is likely to be that the exposed NSA surveillance activities were NOT unlawful. That isn’t to say the NSA’s scarfing up of email and phone call metadata filling acres of computer servers in Utah wasn’t excessive, intrusive and objectionable. It was (and, to the extent ongoing, still is). But we

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Judge orders release of SF Ethics Comm’n docs, despite claim of attorney privilege

Peter Scheer November 1, 2013

By Rick Knee–A Superior Court judge has ordered the San Francisco Ethics Commission to provide a local citizen with two dozen documents regarding proposed city sunshine law enforcement guidelines. In a ruling issued on Oct. 25 and filed on Oct. 29, Judge Ernest Goldman found that the commission’s executive director, John St. Croix, failed to meet a burden of proof that the documents were exempt from disclosure under attorney-client confidentiality privilege provisions in the city

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