Federal agents accused of unwarranted search through journalist’s computer

matthewkeys:

From The Guardian:

Federal agents have been accused of carrying out an improper search of documents contained on the computer of a former Reuters journalist who has been charged with conspiring with hackers to deface the website of the Los Angeles Times.

Matthew Keys, 26, has been indicted for providing a username and password to the hacker group Anonymous that allowed it to hack into the Los Angeles Times website and alter a headline.

At the US district court in Sacramento on Wednesday, an attorney for Keys, Jay Leiderman, said federal agents carried out a trawl of files on Keys’s computer in 2012 that was not allowed under their search warrant. He asked that information taken from the computer be suppressed by the court.

“The warrant did not give the power to rummage through the journalist’s files,” Leiderman said, adding “there is no indication of why all this information needed to be seized”.

The computer in question was used by Keys to send files regarding his own case to another journalist who was writing a book about Anonymous in 2012. It is not clear what the prosecution intends to do with the information agents found during the search or if any of it will be used in an upcoming trial. 

The prosecution argued that agents carried out a broad search of the computer because they were concerned relevant files could have been moved or hidden. They further argued that child pornography cases, in which entire hard drives are seized and used as evidence, set a precedent for such indiscriminate searches.

Leiderman responded by saying, as a journalist, Keys would be unlikely to move or tamper with files relating to an ongoing story and rejected the idea that child pornography cases are analogous to this case.