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Top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee are being urged to advance the “Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying” (PRESS) Act after a group of over 100 lawyers, professors, journalists, and advocacy groups called on lawmakers to advance the bill.
What’s the deal:
The PRESS Act aims to restrict the federal government’s ability to force journalists and telecommunication providers to reveal sources or records related to journalistic activities. This bipartisan legislation seeks to safeguard journalist-source confidentiality, with exceptions for terrorism, severe emergencies, or journalists suspected of criminal activities.
The letter highlights support from notable organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and ProPublica. The Act includes provisions to shield journalists from government surveillance through their communication providers.
The letter also references a recent incident where former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge is being held in contempt of court for refusing to disclose her sources related to a federal investigation involving Yanping Chen. Chen has sued the government over the leak of details about this probe, which focused on statements she made on immigration forms concerning her work on a Chinese astronaut program.
Herridge, who was recently laid off by CBS News, published an investigative series for Fox News in 2017 that examined Chen’s ties to the Chinese military and raised questions about whether the scientist was using a professional school she founded in Virginia to help the Chinese government obtain information about American servicemembers.
The stories relied on what Chen’s lawyers contend were items leaked from the probe, including snippets of an FBI document summarizing an interview conducted during the investigation, personal photographs, and information taken from her immigration and naturalization forms, as well as from an internal FBI PowerPoint presentation.
Chen sued the FBI and Justice Department in 2018, accusing the government of violating the Privacy Act, which prohibits the public disclosure of private information about individuals without their consent. Chen’s lawsuit claims that both her personal and professional lives were upended amid a wave of negative media attention following the leak, leading to hate mail and death threats.
