Reporter Faces Jail Time Over Source for James Holmes Notebook

FoxNews.com reporter Jana Winter is
being pressed by James Holmes’ defense attorneys to reveal her
source for information about a notebook Holmes sent to his
psychiatrist before the Aurora theater shooting. Defense attorneys
contend her source must have violated a gag order by the judge. In
a hearing in December, 14 law enforcement officials were questioned
about the notebook, but none admitted to being the source. The
judge wants
one more detective questioned before compelling the reporter to
take the stand. Winter could face up to six months in jail if she
doesn’t identify her source in that case; she’s
indicated through her attorney that she doesn’t intend to
reveal her source in court.

Winter is theoretically protected from being forced to reveal
her source by shield laws that exist in both New York and Colorado,
as well as a plain reading of the First Amendment, as Judge Andrew
Napolitano, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst and a Reason
contributor,
noted yesterday:

The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to
stimulate and protect open, wide, robust debate about the policies
and personnel of the government. Truth is essential to that
stimulation. Putting reporters in jail for revealing the truth
while protecting their sources is profoundly contrary to that
purpose and highly offensive to the values the First Amendment was
written to protect and we have all come to enjoy.

A New York judge signed off on the Colorado judge’s subpoena of
Winter, who showed up in court Monday but did not yet have to
testify. Her attorneys are looking to avoid her returning to
Colorado all together, or at least until a court in New York has
reviewed their appeal. As I noted about this case
last month, New York’s shield law is more robust than
Colorado’s, which allows a journalist to be compelled to reveal her
sources if all other avenues of uncovering the information have
been exhausted. The information sought also has to be substantially
relevant to the case, which Winter’s attorneys argue it is not.
Journalists, of course, need to be able to protect their sources’
confidentiality across the board in order to be able to secure
confidential sources for any stories, it’s a necessary foundation
of free press. When the government takes for itself the power to
compel a journalist to break the confidentiality of their sources
or newsgathering methods, it erodes that foundation.

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Chinese National Given 5 Years In Jail For Stealing Secret Missile Guidance Data

A federal court has sentenced a Chinese citizen to more than five years in prison for taking thousands of files about a secret military project to China, Peter Finn of The Washington Post reports. The project involves an advanced version of a tiny device that is "designed to allow drones, missiles and rockets to hit targets without satellite guidance." The device, called a disk resonator gyroscope, was being secretly developed for the U.S. military by a small company and L-3 Communications. It "can navigate, control and position missiles, aircraft, drones, bombs, lasers and targets very accurately,” David Smukowski, president of Sensors in Motion, the small company in Bellvue, Wash., told the Post. On Monday a court sentenced Sixing Liu, who worked at L-3’s space and navigation division, to five years and 10 months for exporting defense data without permission plus separate counts of possessing stolen trade secrets and lying to authorities. Prosecutors said Liu, 50, twice told his supervisor he was going on vacation to Chicago when he actually went to China to speak at a technology conference organized by the Chinese government and Chinese universities. “We believe Sixing Liu was a serial thief,” Assistant U.S. Attorney L. Judson Welle said, noting that Liu also took information on other defense systems. Finn notes that military data theft by China is a huge problem as unsealed court documents indicate that "nearly 100 individual or corporate defendants have been charged by the Justice Department with stealing trade secrets or classified information for Chinese entities or exporting military or dual-use technology to China" in the past four years. “These schemes represent a threat to our national security," John Carlin, acting assistant attorney general for national security, told the Post. "The intelligence community has assessed China to be among the most aggressive collectors of sensitive U.S. information and technologies and our criminal prosecutions across the country reflect that assessment.” Last week a U.S. defense contractor in Hawaii was charged with passing classified information about nuclear weapons and ballistic missile systems to his Chinese girlfriend.SEE ALSO:&US Contractor Charged With Passing Nuclear Secrets To A Chinese Woman SEE ALSO:&The Military & Defense Facebook page Please follow Military & Defense on Twitter and Facebook.Join the conversation about this story »

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