Folks in America: Your senators have just a few weeks left to pass the PRESS Act, a federal “shield” bill that the House passed with unanimous and bipartisan support earlier in January but has been waiting in the Senate for a final vote ever since.
The PRESS Act, if passed into law, would enshrine nationwide protections for journalists across the United States from being forced to identify or give up their confidential sources (except in emergency cases, like to prevent an act of terrorism). The bill also grants other protections, such as limiting what records the government can secretly take from journalists or their email or phone provider that could identify their sources — again, with a narrow set of exceptions for emergency threats.
Lawmakers have been pushing to pass federal protections for journalists in the PRESS Act for the past year, citing recent U.S. government abuses. The most recent example was the secret seizure of phone records from journalists who worked for CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post at the request of the Justice Department under the Trump administration, to identify the source of a leak.
As recently noted by The Verge, protections for journalists and their sources will become increasingly relevant in a second Trump term.
Forcing journalists to turn over a source’s identity can have a real chilling effect on newsgathering. People will feel discouraged from talking to journalists, and that harms the public’s ability to be informed about things that affect them. We also increasingly consume our news from independent journalists and smaller outlets, which might not have the legal resources to fight a government subpoena for their records. The PRESS Act would provide the same blanket protections to journalists across the United States and would also cover independent journalists and outlets that publish information in the public interest.
While the bill doesn’t affect the tech industry directly, as a news outlet, TechCrunch is in favor of protecting and building upon press freedoms. Some of TechCrunch’s most read and impactful reporting has come from readers like you, who have reached out and tipped us off to corporate wrongdoing, unearthing mismanagement in the startup world, detailing human rights abuses, and revealing major breaches and data spills, cyberattacks, and criminality that otherwise might have gone unreported. TechCrunch has a history of standing up to legal demands to protect our sources. We can only do this with the protections of press freedoms.
At this point, the PRESS Act already has bipartisan support in the Senate, with Senators Ron Wyden, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Dick Durbin as co-sponsors. But as The Times reports, the bill remains stuck in the Senate Judiciary Committee, reportedly opposed by a small group of senators. As is the nature of Congress, a single opposing lamaker can hold up the legislative process indefinitely.
The bill is waiting for a final vote on the Senate floor, with weeks to go before the bill expires at the end of the congressional session. The ACLU has a simple web form that you can use to send a note to your senators, or you can call or email them directly to ask them to vote for the PRESS Act.