It’s been a long-accepted truism that anything posted online is fair game for anyone else to comment on or respond to. And if it’s posted in a blog, it may also be fair game for a subpoena.

Earlier this month, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Louis Locascio ruled that for purposes of “shield law protection,” bloggers don’t count as journalists because “they are, many times, doing little more than shouting from atop a digital soapbox.” So, in New Jersey at least, bloggers facing subpoenas for the identities of their “off the record” information can’t get away with refusing to name their sources.

“Shield laws,” which are on the books in thirty-six states and the District of Columbia, are state laws that protect the confidentiality of journalistic sources. (As of this posting, there is no federal provision for shield law protection.) Many of our most compelling news stories are attributed to “unnamed sources,” or sources who speak to journalists under a guarantee of anonymity. Without it, they often face loss of employment, social ostracism, and even threats of violence against themselves and their loved ones.

But even journalists who work for established news organizations at times face contempt of court, obstruction of justice, and other criminal charges for refusing to identify their sources. Former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner Judith Miller, who refused to identify sources for stories (which she didn’t write) outing CIA operative Valerie Plame, couldn’t get away with confidentiality of source claims and spent 85 days in jail for contempt of court in 2005.

If an established news organization masthead and professional honors can’t protect you from a jail sentence, the lack of them definitely won’t keep you from facing the music. And your name will be the one in a news article-or a blog.

So if you’d rather have something to blog about besides the inside of a jail cell or solid orange vs. striped uniforms, don’t post anything that you aren’t prepared to testify about in court-including “naming names.”

Update: As of December 10, 2009, a federal shield law, The Free Flow of Information Act, has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee. It is pending in the full Senate and must then be reconciled with a different version passed in the House of Representatives.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Editing Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.