Feds try to forcefully search Wall Street Journal reporter's phone

[cobrat]

@cobrat

I’ve worked on a lot of government contracts, so I have a good sense of how they operate in some areas. What sounds like a company specific trade secrets agreement or maybe a CYA agreement, covering inadvertent disclosures, for a social visit isn’t the same read in given to the employees. Even under the terms of whatever you signed, I bet there’s a big difference between saying I visited an unnamed company at an unnamed location vs senior engineer Smith’s phone at Company X was hacked.

I think an exception should be made for whistle blowers calling attention to mismanagement, waste, and abuse of authority by supervisors or enforcement agents from another agency as the case is alleged here.

[jonri]

Here’s another article on how to protect yourself.

https://www.wired.com/2017/02/guide-getting-past-customs-digital-privacy-intact/

[roethlisburger]

@cobrat

There are laws that protect whistle blowers, but it’s far from clear they would apply here. The first question is did the CBP violate any “law, rule or regulation”, and so far no one’s claimed any specific law, rule, or regulation was violated. I highly doubt the incident would be sustained as not just mismanagement or waste, but reach the higher and required threshold of “gross mismanagement” or “gross waste of funds”. The government regularly finds against alleged whistleblowers with more serious allegations on those counts. His strongest argument might be abuse of authority, but we would still need more information than has been made public to reach an informed judgment. The better option, if he really wanted to blow the whistle, instead of venting on Facebook, would be to report the incident to an inspector general or office of special counsel.

[greenwitch]

@jonri - the article looked interesting but it wouldn’t let me past the first two sentences without demanding that I disable adblocker. Ironic, no?