But the State of Pennsylvania seems to think it can:
"In an unusual and little-known case, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office has seized four computer hard drives from a Lancaster newspaper as part of a statewide grand-jury investigation into leaks to reporters.
The dispute pits the government's desire to solve an alleged felony -- computer hacking -- against the news media's fear that taking the computers circumvents the First Amendment and the state Shield Law."
Source
If it is not abridging the freedom of the press to seize its records and the equipment it uses to do its job, I don't know what would be. But lots of people these days -- including some Supreme Court judges -- seem to think that the Constitution can mean anything they want it to mean.
The cause of the high-handed behaviour was a "leak" investigation. Some reporters had accessed a government database and claimed that the State's coroner had given them the password to enable them to do so -- which he of course denies.
So how is seizing the computers going to show how the reporters got the password? The whole thing is a nonsense and can only be seen as an attempt to intimidate and punish the newspaper.
