Judith Miller is an American journalist and commentator known for her coverage of Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion, which was later discovered to have been based on inaccurate information from the intelligence community. She worked in The New York Times' Washington bureau before joining Fox News in 2008.
A shield law is legislation designed to protect reporters' privilege. This privilege involves the right of news reporters to refuse to testify as to the information and/or sources of information obtained during the news gathering and dissemination process. Currently, the U.S. federal government has not enacted any national shield laws, but most of the 50 states do have shield laws or other protections for reporters in place.
Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665 (1972), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court invalidating the use of the First Amendment as a defense for reporters summoned to testify before a grand jury. The case was argued February 23, 1972 and decided June 29 of the same year. The reporters lost their case by a vote of 5-4. This case is cited for the rule that in federal courts, a reporter may not generally avoid testifying in a criminal grand jury, and it remains the only case in which the U.S. Supreme Court has considered the use of reporters' privilege.
Mary Coyle Chase was an American journalist, playwright and children's novelist, known primarily for writing the 1944 Broadway play Harvey, which was adapted into the 1950 film starring Jimmy Stewart.
James Risen is an American journalist for The Intercept. He previously worked for The New York Times and before that for Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government activities and is the author or co-author of two books about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a book about the American public debate about abortion. Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
James C. Goodale was the vice president and general counsel for The New York Times and, later, the Times' vice chairman.
Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada co-authored the book Game of Shadows while they were reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle. For their investigative work in the field of steroids, Williams and Fainaru-Wada were given the 2004 George Polk Award.
Jeremy Hammond is an American activist and computer hacker from Chicago. He founded the computer security training website HackThisSite in 2003. He was first imprisoned over the Protest Warrior hack in 2005 and was later convicted of computer fraud in 2013 for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor and releasing data to WikiLeaks, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Dudley W. Brown is an American gun rights lobbyist. He is the founder and president of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners and president of the National Association for Gun Rights.
The Free Flow of Information Act is a bill intended to provide a news reporter with the right to refuse to testify as to information or sources of information obtained during the newsgathering and dissemination process.
Malaika Tamu Griffin is an American woman serving a life sentence at the LaVista Correctional Facility in Pueblo, Colorado for shooting her neighbor Jason Patrick Horsley to death in May 1999. After the shooting, Griffin became a fugitive from justice for six years, but after she was profiled on Fox's America's Most Wanted, Griffin was captured in El Cajon, California, a suburb of San Diego, in June 2005.
Hector Xavier Monsegur, known also by the online pseudonym Sabu, is an American computer hacker and co-founder of the hacking group LulzSec. Facing a sentence of 124 years in prison, Monsegur became an informant for the FBI, working with the agency for over ten months to aid them in identifying the other hackers from LulzSec and related groups. LulzSec intervened in the affairs of organizations such as News Corporation, Stratfor, UK and American law enforcement bodies and Irish political party Fine Gael.
On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred inside a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, United States, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. Dressed in tactical clothing, James Holmes set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms. Twelve people were killed and 70 others were injured, 58 of them from gunfire. It was the deadliest shooting in Colorado since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. At the time, the event had the largest number of victims (82) in one shooting in modern U.S. history. This number was eventually surpassed by the 107 victims in the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting.
James Eagan Holmes is an American mass murderer responsible for the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting in which he killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a Century 16 movie theater on July 20, 2012. He had no known criminal background before the shooting occurred. Before the shooting, Holmes booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, which were defused one day later by a bomb squad.
In 2013, the United States Department of Justice, under Attorney General Eric Holder, came under scrutiny from the media and some members of Congress for subpoenaing phone records from the Associated Press (AP). Under similar justifications, a 2010 subpoena approved by Eric Holder implicated Fox News reporter, James Rosen, as a possible co-conspirator under the Espionage Act of 1917. Investigators gained access to the times of his phone calls, and two days of Rosen's emails. Stephen Jin-Woo Kim eventually pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act for communicating North Korean nuclear test plans to Rosen. These investigations provoked considerable criticism from major news organizations, and precipitated the revision of media guidelines at the Department of Justice.
Daniel "Dan" Arshack is an American criminal defense attorney, co-founder of The Bronx Defenders, managing partner of the law firm Arshack, Hajek and Lehrman, PLLC, and a founding member of the International Criminal Bar, which was created to promote "the development of an independent legal profession and practice before the International Criminal Court." Arshack, who has been a defender for his entire career and "has never put anyone behind bars as either a prosecutor or government counsel," is known for his expertise on international criminal justice issues, lawyer trainings, and anti-death penalty advocacy. Arshack has conducted training for lawyers in Paris, Beirut, The Hague, Victoria, Montreal, Liberia, and New York. His specialties are trial advocacy techniques, ethics, and international criminal tribunals. He has also been an adjunct professor of trial advocacy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.
Carlos Armando Samour Jr. is an Associate Justice of the Colorado Supreme Court and former chief judge for the Eighteenth Judicial District Court in Colorado. He is known for serving as the judge for the trial of James Eagan Holmes, the convicted perpetrator of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting.
On November 27, 2015, a mass shooting occurred in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, resulting in the deaths of three people and injuries to nine. A police officer and two civilians were killed; five police officers and four civilians were injured. After a standoff that lasted five hours, police SWAT teams crashed armored vehicles into the lobby and the attacker surrendered.
Jeremy Kaplan is a technology journalist and Content Director with Future plc, publisher of TechRadar. He spent nearly 7 years as Editor-in-Chief of Digital Trends. He has spent over two decades writing about technology in magazines and on websites, with nearly five years as the technology editor for FoxNews.com and over a decade at Ziff Davis Media, publisher of PCMag.com and Extreme Tech.
