Times' Reporters Must Surrender Phone Records to Feds

It always strikes me as more than a tad strange that, again and again, the federal government has to go wandering through journalists notes, thoughts, and phone records to get information they can probably get on their own if they bothered to do any work. From WaPo (and oddly, I see Jeff Gannon, the voice of a "New Media" has linked to this article as well; yeah, he's a new media all right... ::hoot::):

The New York Times may not withhold reporters' phone records from a federal grand jury investigating an alleged leak of a pending government raid on two Islamic charities suspected of supporting terrorism, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

A three-judge panel of the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the Times has no First Amendment or other legal right to refuse a demand for the records from the grand jury in Chicago, which was empaneled by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

The government's interest in rooting out a possible crime outweighs the newspaper's interest in protecting reporters' sources, the court concluded.

"The government has a compelling interest in maintaining the secrecy of imminent asset freezes or searches lest the targets be informed and spirit away those assets or incriminating evidence," Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. wrote. "At stake in the present investigation, therefore, is not only the important principle of secrecy regarding imminent law enforcement actions but also a set of facts -- informing the targets of those impending actions -- that may constitute a serious obstruction of justice."