What kind of an investigative reporter leaves notes with her sources in them laying around at her residence?
I would imagine someone who doesn’t believe we live in a police state. If she is really an “investigative reporter”, she should have known better. How much more will Americans put up with before we go Egyptian?
All of them!
Where do you think they would keep them?
Do you believe they should operate from some secret hideaway?
Do we know that they were laying around? They could have been in a file cabinet or anywhere. It sounds like these people totally ignored the law regarding warrants. And the fact that they asked her if she was the reporter who had written exposes strongly suggests that they deliberately went in search for her notes even though they had no warrant for that. Searching for firearms would allow them to look ANYWHERE, and they obviously didn’t care that there was no reason for them to suspect that her notes were evidence of any crime. It sure seems like they went in search of her notes with the intent to illegally take them under some trumped-up claim that they thought they were evidence of a different crime.
There’s no way to protect yourself against people who take those liberties, except perhaps by using encryption somehow. Putting them in a locked safe wouldn’t even do the job because they could break the lock on the safe claiming they were looking for firearms. She’s a freelancer now so it’s likely that her home is her office.
I’ve thought of this situation as well, with the records that I have. After events that suggested I may have been targeted at my home I took my records with me, both on my laptop and on external storage devices. Turns out they didn’t need to target my INFORMATION in such a way because most of it was typed up on my computer and they can just look on it without having to do a search. Paper records are about the only records they CAN’T get at through NSA so they are the way to go, but they have to be kept somewhere and wherever they are kept can be searched under trumped-up charges. And computers can be confiscated under trumped-up charges as well.
This is a serious mess. There is no way to keep anything confidential when you’re living under the KGB, as we are right now.