A federal appeals court ruled Nov. 10 that the Trump administration’s bid to seize journalists’ records to investigate the source of a classified leak to the press was overbroad and must be narrowed.
LinkedIn, the professional networking platform, is at the center of the case. The platform, which hosts more than one billion accounts, was served with a court order the government obtained to hand over certain data on journalists’ contacts. LinkedIn had asked a federal court to quash or narrow the order, expressing concerns about its users’ privacy.
“Access to sources … is essential where the press seeks to ensure public accountability from the often-opaque bureaucracies that today define the executive function,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a decision extolling the importance of confidential sourcing to the press. “Without confidentiality, the ability to speak is infringed.”
The administration had requested a broad swath of journalists’ metadata as part of the investigation, meaning the government would be able to see who a journalist communicated with, but not the content of the message.
In its unanimous ruling, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the administration’s order for these records was “substantially overbroad.”
A district court had previously sided with the government. The appeals court returned the issue to the lower court, ordering the district court to narrow the order to cut out records with no apparent connection to the investigation. Nevertheless, the court wrote that the government has a legitimate interest in investigating such leaks.
“The government’s strong national security interest in this case need not be submitted to proof; it is self-evident. Leaks of classified materials can transmit highly sensitive information to our adversaries in areas in which stealth is essential. Such leaks can also place in greater danger the lives of the men and women working in covert operations to protect our country,” the decision reads.
The government pushed for the unamended order to go through. LinkedIn’s main request was for the court to scrap it entirely, which the panel rejected.
The ruling, which said it had to speak generally because of national security concerns, describes the article only as reporting classified details of a top-secret U.S. military operation abroad that had not been previously reported.
Panel Warns of Overreach
The ruling for the three-judge panel was authored by Wilkinson, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan. The panel also included Judge Andrew Wynn, an appointee of President Barack Obama, and Judge Nicole Berner, an appointee of President Joe Biden.
Wilkinson wrote that, as it stands, the order from the government “would reveal every confidential source the targeted journalists interacted with through LinkedIn during the targeted eighteen-month period. While that order may catch sources relevant to the government’s investigation, it will also inevitably sweep in every other confidential source with whom the targeted journalists spoke.”
The panel said that the targeted journalists “reported on almost 1,000 stories on a wide range of issues during the relevant period and investigated an unknown number of others never published. Many of those stories appear far removed from the Article that the leak at least partially enabled.”
“The government has no apparent interest in the identities of those confidential sources, but their disclosure could not help but deal a damaging blow to First Amendment freedoms,” the panel said.
