A Stitch in Haste

Apparently we now need "reader of journalists" privilege:

Phoenix New Times owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were arrested Thursday night by Maricopa County sheriff's deputies on charges of revealing grand jury information, a misdemeanor.

The charges stem from a story published under their byline in the Thursday edition of New Times, in which they describe a subpoena the paper reportedly received from a grand jury convened by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.
...
The scope of the subpoena is unusually broad: It not only demands information from the reporters but also information about all the online readers of the publication since Jan. 1, 2004, including their Internet domain names and browsers and what other Web sites they visited before reading New Times.

Someone should remind Sheriff Joe Arpaio (whose prison management tactics are so controversial as to have attracted the attention of Amnesty International) that illegally publishing information (assuming such a thing is even possible under the First Amendment) is not the same as reading allegedly illegally published information (which is unarguably protected by the First Amendment).

Fortunately, no one needed to remind the district attorney, who promptly dismissed all charges against the New Times publishers, thereby quashing his own subpoena.

It's quite simple really: The subpoena power is not an unchecked license to engage in fishing expeditions or to ride roughshod over the Fourth Amendment (or, worse, to retaliate against critics of an egomaniacal moral defective — remember: sheriffs are politicians).

It is not illegal, without more, to visit a newspaper's website. There is therefore no basis, no grounds whatsoever, to subpoena that information. Aggregate statistics, perhaps, but not detailed personal information that in no way facilitates any legitimate criminal investigation.

Subpoenas are tools, dangerous tools, given to prosecutors — in the same way, for the same reasons and with the same limitations — that firearms are given to police officers. And, like cops with guns, improper use of subpoenas must be swiftly dealt with.