An appeals court has told the Justice Department it cannot use a leak investigation to collect LinkedIn data on journalists who have "no conceivable relationship" to the case.
The DOJ was looking into suspected leaks of top-secret military information tied to a news report that President Trump said exposed confidential military information in a foreign country. It asked LinkedIn for 18 months of communications from targeted journalists, who together published more than 1,000 articles on many different topics in that period. The request was not limited to the reporters behind the story. It also reached journalists with any possible link to them around the time the report was drafted.
LinkedIn argued that most journalists keep accounts on the platform and publish their contact details to invite sources to reach out. The judges agreed the harm went beyond the targeted reporters, ruling that the request threatened a platform where journalists routinely connect with confidential sources. They also pointed to "a vast number of confidential sources" caught up in the demand.
The secrecy order may be the more unusual detail. The administration secured an order barring LinkedIn from telling anyone about the request for a year. The judges ruled that this left journalists unaware for far too long that their First Amendment rights had been compromised.
The scope problem is easy to see. A reporter's notebook sits in a desk drawer; a reporter's LinkedIn inbox sits on a company's servers, and the "contact me" invitation that makes the platform useful also makes it a ready-made list of sources. Government pursuit of reporters' records is not new. In 2013, the Justice Department drew heavy criticism for obtaining Associated Press phone records. What differs here is the breadth of the net and a platform that holds years of messages.
The open question is the gag. When the company holding the data is barred from speaking for a year, who is positioned to object on behalf of the people whose messages are at stake?