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WASHINGTON -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation will represent a Seattle journalist collective that is the target of a police probe and court-imposed gag order.
On Saturday evening, FBI agents visited the downtown offices of the Independent Media Center and handed the group a court order -- apparently related to the Quebec City trade summit -- that also instructed the media organization not to publish the contents of the order.
That unusual event grabbed the attention of the civil liberties organization, which is stepping into the fray and hopes to persuade a federal judge to lift the gag order. Other groups also may be part of the legal team.
"It is possible that the gag order may come off very soon," says Lee Tien, an EFF staff attorney. "I would be on the lookout."
It's not uncommon for law enforcement to deliver an order to an ISP or telephone company, requesting certain information that it restricts the company from discussing. But civil libertarians are comparing this incident to federal agents visiting, for example, the New York Times newsroom, and barring the paper from publishing any details of the visit.
Still unclear is what the gag order says, or doesn't say. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported on Tuesday that the FBI visit was connected to the online publishing of security plans from the high-level trade summit held last weekend.
Jill Freidberg, a Seattle IMC spokeswoman, said that "what was put out on the Seattle P-I is filled with unfathomable inaccuracies" but, citing the gag order, refused to provide details. She said that her group plans a press conference for sometime in the next 48 hours.
"There are a few limited situations in which there are legal gag orders," says Doug Honig, public education director for the ACLU's Washington state chapter. He gave three examples: Testimony before a grand jury, a trial where the judge tells the attorneys not to give interviews, and an out-of-court settlement.
"In this situation we don't understand why there was a gag order in the first place," Honig said. "It certainly shouldn't be the case that a government official would tell an organization that they can't talk about a situation.... Based on what we've heard so far, we don't know why there was a gag order."
Micah Anderson, another member of the left-leaning collective, said in a pair of e-mail messages that the group couldn't release information about the visit for fear of running afoul of the gag order.
"The situation is under control and we'll be passing along information as soon as we are able, once we are able to not purjure (sic) ourselves due to the gag order," Anderson said. "All will be clear, but the IMC has not been compromised in any way, no raid happened. We had a visit, but it was strictly to serve the order."
Over the weekend, a report that appeared on and then was deleted from an IMC site said the FBI had an "arrest warrant for Jonathan Jay because of a supposed threat against President Bush on the Montreal IMC site." Jay is the name that appears in the domain registration for indymedia.org, but it could be an alias or someone who is no longer affiliated with the group.
The IMC is a collective that includes hundreds of loosely affiliated journalists who produce audio, video, and print reports. It began with the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, and then spread to other cities and other political events.
According to the IMC's self-description, it's "a grassroots organization committed to using media production and distribution as a tool for promoting social and economic justice."
It's not the first time the group has run into trouble with the police: IMC reporters generally are sympathetic to the activists they write about, and some participate in the demonstrations they cover. A standard line from IMC organizers during orientation sessions is: "If you do a protest, take off your press pass first."
The Post-Intelligencer article originally said that "security plans intended to protect Western leaders attending a trade summit in Quebec City were stolen from a car there over the weekend and posted, hours later, on a Seattle-based Web site."
On Wednesday, the newspaper added an editor's note saying that the original report was inaccurate.
*Ryan Sager contributed to this report. *
