The case of the lost (stolen?) iPhone 4G prototype that wound up in the hands of Gizmodo just gets more and more bizarre.
You may have heard that, last Friday, police armed with a search warrant raided the home of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen and seized a number of his computers as evidence. The criminal investigation — which was instigated by Apple — was to determine if Chen and/or Gizmodo broke the law by receiving what could be considered stolen property, and to learn the identity of the person who sold Gizmodo the prototype for US$5,000.00.
Gawker (Gizmodo's parent company) promptly cried foul, arguing that as a journalist, Chen was protected under California's "shield law," which protects journalists from search warrants if they refuse to disclose a
source or unpublished information. (There is still some debate as to whether that law applies in this case.)
Since the raid on Chen's house, investigators have identified and interviewed — but not released the name of — the person who found the iPhone after Apple engineer Gray Powell accidentally left it in a Redwood City, California bar. However, they have not indicated whether this is also the person who sold the iPhone to Gizmodo.
[Via Mashable]
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The phone was *clearly* stolen because the “finder” never made any real attempt to return it to anyone. He called the main switchboard at a multi-billion dollar company. What did he expect, “If you have found a lost prototype device, please press 7″? Further, under California law, property worth over $100 must be turned into the police and *never* becomes the property of the finder. It was sold for $5000, so obviously the “finder” believed it to be worth more than $100.
Further, shield laws also clearly do not apply to investigations of possible crimes committed *by* a journalist. Not a single precedent says otherwise. If the laws protected journalists from being investigated for committing crimes themselves, that would give any journalist the ability to do anything they wanted to do and just claim “I’m a journalist! You can’t investigate me!”.