Worth a read: <a href="http://www.rcfp.org/reporters-field-guide" rel="nofollow">http://www.rcfp.org/reporters-field-guide</a><p>Generally: the First Amendment protects the right to publish news, but not to gather it; when it comes to newsgathering, the law generally doesn't favor reporters over any other kind of person. There are (according to RCFP) some jurisdiction-specific protections for newsgathering, but it's hard to read RCFP's guide and leave with the sense that the Constitution permits reporters to commit felonies in the interest of getting stories.<p>So, James Rosen. James Rosen (allegedly; for brevity, add "allegedly" mentally to everything else in this graf) received secret information from Stephen Kim, a counterproliferation analyst at LLNL. Kim passed information to Rosen about the proximity of a North Korean nuclear test. Kim's response was that the information he shared was harmless. The DoJ's response was that it wasn't, and that aside from the direct details about the DPRK nuclear test, the specificity of the information shared threatened sources & methods, and that regardless Kim was criminally liable for sharing top secret classified information.<p>(FAS, as always, does a great job of keeping up with the paperwork of the case: <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/kim/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fas.org/sgp/jud/kim/</a>)<p>It's not at all surprising to me that in a case where an analyst leaks counterproliferation data to a reporter, the DoJ would have an interest in ensuring that the reporter wasn't an accessory to the crime of leaking the information. Simply hearing a leaked story isn't criminal, but coaching an insider to do so is. DoJ has a valid interest in figuring out which happened with Rosen.<p>James Rosen has not been charged with any crime. Stephen Kim, the leaker, is dollars-to-donuts going to prison; his defense seems already to have conceded the leak occurred, and posits that his prosecution is political.<p>As I've said on other threads, I'm ambivalent about counterterrorism. When I think about it in the context of signals intelligence, I'm fine with it. When I think about it in the context of the TSA and electronic strip searches, I'm not. But this isn't a terrorism case.<p>I am not at all ambivalent about counterproliferation. Just 40 years ago the US was locked in a standoff with an adversary with enough nuclear weapons to end life on the planet. Today, that adversary is a shambles, split into countries of varying competence and openness, any of which might have enough nuclear materiel to end a major world city. Meanwhile, the world's most evil country has a functioning nuclear arms program and is thought to be arming dictatorships around the world for money.<p>I'm glad DoJ isn't playing games in cases involving proliferation.