A blogger was arrested for invading the privacy of a relative of a political candidate:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/17/politics/mississippi-gop-primary-arrest/
“The arrest of a man who allegedly obtained an image of a senator’s bedridden wife has shaken up an already intense Republican primary battle in Mississippi.
Political blogger Clayton Kelly was arrested Thursday, accused of exploiting a vulnerable adult and illegally and improperly obtaining a photo of her without her consent for his own benefit, according to the Madison Police Department.
Donald Clark, an attorney for Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, and his wife, Rose, told The Clarion-Ledger newspaper that the woman in question is Rose, saying the Cochrans’ “privacy and dignity have been violated.” Rose Cochran suffers from dementia and has lived at St. Catherine’s Village, the nursing home where Thursday’s incident took place, for 14 years, according to the newspaper.”
The usual suspects will cry foul. Journalists – even bloggers – should always be free to say anything they want to about the political class.
On its face, of course, the arrest is a prior restraint, since no one has established the blogger’s guilt in a court of law.
However, this is not the first case of this type. Last year, the Legal Schnauzer blog, which admittedly published defamatory material, was shut down before a court could adjudicate:
It’s clear that Southern courts are taking an aggressive position on the issue.
Frankly, constitution or not, I can sympathize with the victims. If political bloggers cannot tell the difference between a public issue and a private, they might need a severe shaking-up to find out.
On the other hand, the whole business worries me a lot.
While the first use of the law to pre-emptively discard public speech might be exerted on an obviously unsympathetic figure, it doesn’t follow that every other use will be.
For instance, there was another recent case of an outspoken blogger with powerful enemies being arrested, without a search warrant, for having child-porn on his computer.
Here, the charges do in fact look trumped up and motivated by resentment of the blogger’s political speech:
These days, with the government privy to every move you make on the Internet, how hard would it be for someone to get a friend in government or a former government employee or contractor to download something onto your computer?
Not very hard, said a counter-terrorism expert I spoke to, although an FBI agent told me the FBI could always determine how any material was downloaded.
Still, if you’re a political blogger, the chances are you don’t want to be relying on the good offices of the FBI to avert a long stay in jail.