When President Joe Biden said “journalism is not a crime” last April, federal prosecutors in Tampa, Florida, apparently took that as a challenge. Not a crime yet.
The next month, FBI agents raided the home of journalist Tim Burke. He is scheduled to be arraigned in the coming weeks under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and wiretap laws for finding and disseminating unaired Fox News footage of Kanye West’s antisemitic rant to Tucker Carlson. The indictment doesn’t accuse Burke of hacking or deceit. Instead, its theory is that he didn’t have permission to access the video, even though it was at a public, unencrypted URL that he found using publicly posted demo credentials.
But finding things that the powerful don’t want found is essentially the definition of investigative journalism—which, as Biden said, is not criminal in this country.
A recent court filing heightens concerns about whether prosecutors hid from the judge who authorized the raid that Burke was a journalist. By doing so, they may have avoided scrutiny of whether their investigation—and eventual indictment—of Burke complied with the First Amendment, federal law, and the Department of Justice’s own policies.
That’s just as much bullshit as when that asshole racist white nationalist fuck weev (I’m not providing links because fuck him) accessed a bunch of ATT endpoint on their website that had customer information on them. As I recall (I won’t research because fuck him), they were sequentially labeled. He made this public and got jailed for hacking. He did no hacking. Again, fuck him, but that asshole saw a bad security practice and took advantage.
And before you say this is like walking through an unlocked door, no it isn’t. That’d be like being shown a credential window that accepted a null (empty) password and clicking through. This is more like having shit on your front lawn, but your address is unpublished so someone needed to know where to go to see your lawn.
Fuck weev. Fuck white nationalism. Fuck the DOJ. Fuck Israel.