The Marion raid appears to be the first time public officials have searched a newspaper under the claim of enforcing a computer crime law.
These laws can be readily used to intimidate reporters and suppress reporting without raiding their offices. Instead, the Marion case highlights a separate, systemic threat to press freedom: vague and sweeping computer crime laws, which exist in all 50 states. After the Supreme Court refused to offer protection from such raids, Congress passed the 1980 statute, making newsroom searches far less of a threat. In the infamous 1971 search of the Stanford Daily, for example, Palo Alto police were seeking photographs to tie Vietnam War protesters to a violent clash on campus.
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Such searches were seen as the ultimate attack on the free press. But the outcry goes back to colonial days, when British-loyalist redcoats raided revolutionary American pamphleteers.
Newsroom searches are rare today because a 1980 federal law makes them almost always illegal. After several days of public outcry, the county attorney ordered the material returned. Last month, police officers in Marion, Kan., crashed into the newsroom of the Marion County Record, a weekly newspaper, and the home of its publisher to seize computers, cellphones and documents.
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