Gizmodo: “The FBI raided the home of The Washington Post reporter and “federal government whisperer” Hannah Natanson last week. The agency seized her private laptop, work laptop, work phone, a 1 TB portable hard drive, a Garmin running watch, and a voice recorder she uses for work, according to newly released court documents. For the past year, Natanson had been covering President Trump’s reshaping of the federal government. One of her confidential sources, government contractor Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones, who previously held a top-secret security clearance, is being investigated by the FBI for an alleged national security leak. Through her phone, the FBI gained access to Natanson’s texts and voice recordings with confidential sources, including the 1,169 new sources who wrote to her, willing to share their experience working for the federal government under Trump. Through her work computer, the FBI obtained extensive access to the Washington Post’s operations. In a court declaration, Natanson said that the FBI now has access to her Google Drive and Proton Drive, a cloud-based service that she used to store sensitive information in encrypted form, both of which contain confidential information from sources. The FBI also has access to the Post’s content management system, which she says “provides an enormous window” into all stories in progress at The Post, and the organization’s Slack…” [h/t  Pete Weiss]

• See also Court Watch – “The feds can’t look at a Washington Post reporter’s notes, contacts, and other possessions, at least for now. Though confirming in a court declaration that a source is a source before the government actually indicted the said source for providing classified documents to a reporter because it increases the odds that it’ll help encourage a judge to give back a news organization’s laptop, seems less than ideal…”
• See also Lawfare – Putting Press Freedom to the Test – The FBI’s search of a Washington Post reporter’s home raises questions about the protections afforded to journalists in leak cases…More recently, however, the Espionage Act has attracted notice for how it has been deployed against leakers of classified information—to the press, not to foreign powers. A seminal example is Daniel Ellsberg’s prosecution for leaking the Pentagon Papers…”
• See also the Nieman Reports – US Media in the Crosshairs. The Trump administration is deploying a range of legal weapons to attack US news outlets.
• See also Reporters Without Borders – One year into Trump’s second term: increasingly repressive US president on track to join ranks of world’s worst press freedom predators.