Generally it takes a subpoena for the government to do searches or seizures of a journalist's work product or documents. But it's an open question whether the protections of the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 also extend to documents stored on servers managed by the likes of Google or Amazon, Jonathan W. Peters writes in the Columbia Journalism Review. "We no longer live in the 1980-world where the PPA was passed. It needs to enter the digital era," Peters says.
February 7, 2012