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Fair Game (2010) – IMDb – A thriller based on a book the CIA litigated to redact

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| 1A, Freedom of Expression, General, Law and movies

Fair Game Poster

More at IMDbPro

Fair Game (I) (2010)

… CIA operative Valerie Plame discovers her identity is allegedly leaked by the government as payback for an op-ed article her husband wrote criticizing the Bush administration. …

Stars: Naomi Watts, Sean Penn and Sonya Davison

… Plame’s status as a CIA agent was revealed by White House officials allegedly out to discredit her husband after he wrote a 2003 New York Times op-ed piece saying that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

via imdb.com

This movie is based on the experiences of Valerie Plame, about whom I have blogged here. The case about the redaction of the book which became the screenplay is here. Given that trailers and posters for the movie have been appearing over the last short while, I don’t expect it to suffer the same direct-to-dvd fate as befell Nothing But the Truth, more loosely based on the experiences of Judith Miller, about whom I have blogged here.

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I spy, but I can’t show and tell

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| Freedom of Expression, prior restraint

Cover of 'Fair Game' by Valerie Plame via Simon & Schuster websiteJudith Miller published a story which, among other things, named Valerie Plame as a CIA spy. In later grand jury proceedings, Miller declined to name her source, despite a decision of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals that she had to do so, and spent 85 days in prison for her troubles. In truth, both Plame and Miller were pawns in a bigger game being played by the White House, but a lawsuit by Plame against members of the Bush administration was dismissed. In the meantime, Plame wrote a memoir about the affair: Fair Game. My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House (cover left) (Amazon | Simon & Schuster) but she was prevented by the CIA from writing about various aspects of her employment with them. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held (pdf) yesterday that this restriction did not infringe her First Amendment right to free speech.

When she joined the CIA, she signed a standard form secrecy agreement in which she agreed never to disclose classified information which she obtained in the course of her employment, and to submit publications which could do so to the CIA for pre-publication review, and – in Wilson v CIA – the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the CIA’s refused to allow her to disclose her dates of service and other information relating to her employment before 2002.…

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Two journalists’ conceptions of source privilege

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| General, journalism, Journalists' sources

Cover of Novak's autobiography In today’s Irish Times obituary of Robert Novak (pictured left, on the cover of his autobiography), there is an excellent summary of the Judith Miller affair. From the obituary (with added links):

Conservative US columnist revealed identity of CIA officer

… Six years ago, he crowned his long record of controversial disclosures by revealing the name and position of Valerie Plame, a clandestine CIA officer involved with intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former US diplomat, had enraged the Bush administration by publicly questioning the White House’s misuse of such intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq.

Publishing Plame’s name broke federal law and there was a ferocious hunt for Novak’s source, which he stoutly refused to name. This witch-hunt eventually brought prison sentences for a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, and for Lewis Libby, the chief of staff of former US vice-president Dick Cheney.

Under continuing pressure, Novak told all to a federal grand jury, naming the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, and US president George W Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove as his sources. He justified his action on the basis that both officials had already identified themselves.

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Journalists’ source privilege: one privilege or two?

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| Freedom of Expression, Irish cases, journalism, Journalists' sources, Supreme Court of Canada

Journalism Matters banner, from the NUJ website.Journalists’ source privilege is in the air. In the US, the House of Representatives has recently passed a (not particularly readable) Bill recognising a journalists’ source privilege (the Free Flow of Information Act of 2009), and it has been introduced into the Senate. In the UK, a prosecution of a local newspaper journalist and the police source who “leaked” stories to her was recently dismissed (indeed, a similar case against a member of parliament will also not proceed, though another is still pending).

On a judicial level, the Trial Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCCL) (pdf) (noted on the CPJ blog), relying on the earlier decision of the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in Prosecutor v Bradjanin and Talic (11 December 2002), held that a Liberian journalist did not have to divulge the names of those who facilitated his access to a war zone. In Sanoma Uitgevers BV v the Netherlands Application no 38224/03 (31 March 2009) (noted in my previous post), building on its seminal and hugely influential decision in Goodwin v UK Application no 17488/90, [1996] ECHR 16 (27 March 1996), the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) explored the limits of such a privilege.…

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Journalists, sources, bloggers, privilege

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| Freedom of Expression, Journalists' sources
Judith Miller, via her site

I believe in equality for everyone,
except reporters and photographers.

Mahatma Ghandi
[source]

With pending decisions relating to the protection of journalists’ sources in the Supreme Courts in Ireland and Canada, to say nothing of a new movie inspired by the travails of Judith Miller (pictured above left), a student note in the current Columbia Law Review (December 2008, Vol 108, No 8,) is very timely (notwithstanding Ghandi’s quip, above). Here’s the abstract:

David Abramowicz “Calculating the Public Interest in Protecting Journalists’ Confidential Sources”

Most federal circuits recognize a qualified journalist’s privilege not to identify a confidential source. In shielding journalists from some subpoenas, those courts recognize, at least implicitly, a public interest in newsgathering sufficient to overcome its interest in obtaining evidence. But courts pay little attention to the nature or scope of the newsgathering interest. They treat it as fixed, an approach that overlooks the reality that certain uses of confidential sources benefit the public more than others. Some judges and commentators have called for a flexible approach toward measuring the newsgathering interest, but their proposals, which rely on an analysis of the value of a confidential source’s information, would yield unpredictable results. These proposals have not gained traction.

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