U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the revision of the Justice Department’s regulations to restrict federal prosecutors’ ability to obtain journalists’ phone and email records in government leak investigations with narrow exceptions. The Department of Justice said this decision codifies Garland’s July 2021 policy chang to extend the protections.
“This is an important step to protect press freedom in the United States. These significant restraints to the Justice Department’s ability to subpoena journalists’ source material send a powerful message about the importance of reporters’ ability to protect their sources,” said CPJ U.S. and Canada Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. CPJ and other press freedom organizations have long been advocating for this decision.
In a new feature, CPJ’s Europe Representative Attila Mong explores how the conditions to enable critical reporting in Greece have deteriorated in recent years.
During a fact-finding mission to Greece last month, Mong spoke with journalists on the ground about the unsolved journalist killings in the country, how the threat of violence has chilled reporting, journalist concerns about surveillance, and how the new government under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is especially sensitive to critical reporting.
For many journalists covering issues like organized crime, protests, refugee movements, the threat of violence is part of their everyday working lives. Extremists groups have also launched arson attacks against media outlets. Authorities in most cases have failed to identify the perpetrators, compounding journalists’ feelings that they put themselves in harm’s way simply by doing their jobs.
