RonNell Andersen Jones

afford the legal battle that might be on the other end of it, or who in this instance don't want them to be criminally charged, will think twice before they engage in behavior that is critical of the government or that might be aggressive investigative journalism.

And the overarching effect of this, the fear is, is that it quells important government on matters of public concern because people are making front-end calculations to sort of stop the kind of coverage that they engage in.

So lots of civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, are condemning these sorts of moves.

The concern that they're expressing is that this is part and parcel of a wider democratic backsliding, that there's an interrelationship between press freedom and the backsliding of democracy more generally, that it's

central to our conversations about self-government and the kind of policies that we want to have and the kinds of viewpoints that we want to advance with our government to be able to have a free flow of news coverage.

The concern here that has been expressed by lots of these civil liberties organizations is that these become tools for government to avoid transparency or to reshape truth.

And those sorts of concerns are broader than the individual rights of particular journalists.

The Supreme Court has said lots of times that press freedom rights really aren't about special rights for journalists.

They're about the rights for all of us.

The journalists are standing in our stead and engaging in that behavior on our behalf.

And so there's a wider democratic concern that's at play there.

The Department of Justice got a warrant to search the home of a Washington Post reporter named Hannah Nattinson.

The search was broadly executed.

They took laptops and a cell phone and a smartwatch and recording devices and

a portable hard drive that the Washington Post says contained multiple terabits of information, something like 30,000 emails, took all of this in this search of her home.

A search of a journalist's home is a very big deal and really an unprecedented move and is governed by federal law in a way that is making this a real challenge.

And all of the sort of

Dynamics about the wider chilling effect that we were just discussing come into play again here.

The concerns are not just the target of the individual search, but all of the sources who might be swept up in that search.

So that case is progressing through the court, both to challenge the individual search, which press freedom advocates are concerned violated a clear federal law.