One of the things which I find repulsive are the "press shield" laws which provide protection to 'official' members of the press while claiming that the plebes in their pajamas have no such expectation of source protection. Last Friday, a three-judge panel of the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals wrote one of those throw-away paragraphs which will eventually put paid to that false dichotomy.
Their opinion is in http://www.ca1.uscourts.gov/.... Other people will make more of the broad nature of the decision about the First and Fourth Amendments; I leave that to them. I'm more interested in a throw-away sentence at the end of a paragraph.
First, some background. Simon Glik, a resident of the City of Botson, filmed an on-going arrest taking place on Boston Common on his (clearly visible) cell-phone camera. After the arrest was completed, the police officers involved confiscated his phone; later still, Glik was charged with wiretapping and a couple of other offenses. These charges were dismissed, after which Glik requested an internal review of the officers' behavior, and, when no such review was performed, sued the policemen and the City for civil rights violations.
That case is still undecided, and, in fact, has not yet been heard. After an adverse decision by the circuit judge concerning qualified immunity, the officers appealed to the First Circuit. The First Circuit panel decided against the officers, which, presumably, clears the way for the case to proceed to trial, assuming that no further appeals are forthcoming.
I just finished reading the panel's opinion, and one particular paregraph jumped out at me.
It is of no significance that the present case, unlike
Iacobucci and many of those cited above, involves a private
individual, and not a reporter, gathering information about public
officials. The First Amendment right to gather news is, as the
Court has often noted, not one that inures solely to the benefit of
the news media; rather, the public's right of access to information
is coextensive with that of the press. Houchins, 438 U.S. at 16
(Stewart, J., concurring) (noting that the Constitution "assure[s]
the public and the press equal access once government has opened
its doors"); Branzburg, 408 U.S. at 684 ("[T]he First Amendment
does not guarantee the press a constitutional right of special
access to information not available to the public generally.").
Indeed, there are several cases involving private individuals among
-12-the decisions from other courts recognizing the First Amendment
right to film. See, e.g., Smith, 212 F.3d 1332; Robinson v.
Fetterman, 378 F. Supp. 2d 534 (E.D. Pa. 2005) (holding that arrest
of individual filming police activities from private property
violated First Amendment); Cirelli v. Town of Johnston Sch. Dist.,
897 F. Supp. 663 (D.R.I. 1995) (holding that teacher had a right
under the First Amendment to videotape potentially hazardous
working conditions at school, which were a matter of public
concern). Moreover, changes in technology and society have made
the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly
difficult to draw. The proliferation of electronic devices with
video-recording capability means that many of our images of current
events come from bystanders with a ready cell phone or digital
camera rather than a traditional film crew, and news stories are
now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a
reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why
the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn
on professional credentials or status.
There are several things about this quotation I want to call out. First, it specifically mentions
bloggers as members of the press, and directly asserts press protections to them in close to the broadest terms possible. Second, it asserts those protections in the explicit context of technological changes -- that is, it specifically states that those protections are and must be considered equally potent for any citizen as they are for the "officially recognized" press.
W00t!