Should Josh Wolf turn over his tape?

SF Weekly: Should journalist Josh Wolf be afraid? The Assistant U.S. Attorney, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the SFPD want to get their hands on a video shot by a San Francisco blogger.

At times, Josh Wolf is a journalist. At others, he's a blogger, an activist, or an anarchist. At this particular time, one thing's for certain: He's got a videotape the federal government wants.

The 23-year-old San Franciscan possesses a tape that Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan deems essential to a grand jury investigation of a protest last July that resulted in injuries to two San Francisco Police Department officers.

To Wolf, the government subpoena of his tape represents a threat to his ability to gather news as an independent reporter. He believes it's yet another reel cast in a Justice Department fishing expedition that will stop at nothing to put his activist compatriots behind bars.

To the government, however, Wolf is a misguided, self-important young radical withholding evidence without legal justification. Regardless of the outcome, Wolf's predicament raises questions about how much information journalists should turn over to the federal government, and how the legal system handles those who draw little distinction between citizen journalism and citizen activism.

Though many facts are disputed, all parties agree that Wolf videotaped a July 8, 2006 [they mean 2005], protest march in San Francisco against the G8 Summit taking place in Scotland. At previous protests, Wolf had attended as an advocate for a cause, but this time he went as a journalist, gathering footage for his videoblog, "The Revolution Will Be Televised" (www.joshwolf.net).

"Most of the time I go out, I feel like I'm a fly on the wall," Wolf says. "Whether or not I agree with what they're doing, my role is to document it."

On the portion of Wolf's video that he released publicly, dozens of protesters, some dressed in black and wearing face masks, marched down the street in the Mission carrying signs and placards with anticapitalist, anti-government slogans or bearing the logo of the group Anarchist Action. Around dusk, things went awry; the tape shows marchers setting off fireworks and dragging metal newsstand boxes into the street to block traffic. ...

Wolf doesn't want to give up the complete, unedited version of the tape. He believes the federal government is indiscriminately monitoring antiwar groups under suspicion of terrorism, and as a journalist he shouldn't be forced to surrender unused footage in support of that investigation. He won't say, though, what's on the 15 or more minutes of the confidential portion of video. ...

Two weeks ago, Wolf's pro-bono lawyers argued a motion in federal court to quash the subpoena before Judge Maria-Elena James. They claimed that Wolf is protected by California's shield law, which allows journalists to maintain confidential unpublished information obtained during newsgathering. The law lets journalists cast a wide net in reporting, even though they may end up seeing or hearing actions that are illegal. Granting the government widespread power to request unused recordings, Wolf's lawyers argued, would turn journalists into an arm of the Justice Department, creating a chilling effect among citizens, thereby violating their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.

Of course, this contention assumed that Wolf, a self-appointed citizen-journalist, is every bit as much a "professional" as the men and women with years of experience and an editor reviewing their copy — something that's still a matter of debate among the media. Nevertheless, as more Americans become self-appointed citizen journalists, with camera phones and digital cameras and even cheap handheld video cameras, more "news" will come from people like Wolf. ...

Actually, no. No one is claiming that Wolf is acting as a "professional." But the millions of us who believe in the concept of citizen journalism believe that journalism is not restricted to an elite caste of professionals practicing journalism as a black art. Journalism historically is open to anyone who possesses the tools and skill sets to pass along newsworthy events he or she has witnessed. Wolf was surely acting as a journalist here. (The resulting footage resulted in All Empires Must Fall, a video account of the protest on Ourmedia.)

Here's another example of how citizen journalism is taking center stage in the legal arena. Of course, Josh Wolf, as an Internet publisher, might well decide to turn over his videotape, as other publishers sometimes do.