Whistleblowers

A Washington, D.C., judge found that the Metropolitan Police Department’s media policy is constitutional, but how the department enforced it against a detective who spoke out against it to a newspaper in 2009 was unlawful.

District Judge James Boasberg ruled that Detective William Hawkins did not break department rules when he talked to a Washington Post reporter because he spoke as a representative of a police union and not a member of the department.

Update, Oct. 23: Kiriakou pleaded guilty today to one count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent and will likely be sentenced to two and a half years years imprisonment under a plea deal with prosecutors. As part of the agreement, the remaining four counts of the indictment, including three counts of violating the Espionage Act, were dismissed. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced in January.

A federal appeals court allowed a former Detroit prosecutor to continue investigating the identity of a source who leaked information about an internal ethics probe against him to a Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper reporter. The decision, which was released Friday, overturns a district court’s ruling that threw out the case last year and now leaves a newspaper vulnerable to investigations eight years after a U.S. Department of Justice insider leaked information to the reporter.

In an attempt to "deter and detect" officials leaking information to news media organizations, the head of the country's intelligence community unveiled new measures on Monday, including lie detector tests and inspector general investigations, for preventing unauthorized disclosures.

Classified portions of oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. (4th Cir.) will be closed to the public in the government's case against ex-CIA official Jeffrey Sterling, who is charged with violating the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information. Only arguments pertaining to the subpoena of New York Times reporter James Risen will be heard in open court.

A federal grand jury handed down a five-count criminal indictment against former CIA intelligence officer John C. Kiriakou for allegedly disclosing confidential information to journalists on multiple occasions.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals set a precedent for balancing a speaker's right to anonymous speech with a plaintiff's right to pursue a defamation claim on January 12, when it ruled that a trade association didn’t have to disclose the name of an anonymous tipster.

Open government organizations praised what they called sweeping commitments to promote government transparency and accountability in an action plan released by President Obama last week, but many said they were cautious in their optimism that the pledge alone would be enough to bring historical change to the culture of secrecy in Washington.

A district court decision that disclosing information about fraud or securities violations to the media is not protected under the whistleblower provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was affirmed on Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco (9th Cir.), sitting in Seattle.

At least one government agency is using subpoenas to target e-mail between journalists and potential sources by going after the source.

Two self-proclaimed fraud convicts recently turned over thousands of documents  rather than fight a Securities and Exchange Commission subpoena that asked for, among other things, e-mail the men had exchanged with reporters.