newsgathering

A British photojournalist was arrested by police as he used a drone above the scene of a fatal fire, The Guardian's Ben Quinn reports. Even though Eddie Mitchell had permission from the landowner to use his drone and is one of the few journalists authorized by the Civil Aviation Authority (the UK equivalent to the Federal Aviation Administration) to fly drones, he was held in police custody for more than 5 hours and had the controller to his drone snatched from his hands. Mitchell told The Guardian "'it was an incredibly dangerous thing that they did. They didn’t know the dangers that they were putting myself, themselves and passing air traffic in. It could have flown off in any direction. They were passing the controller between themselves and eventually got it down with a thud.”'

In an exclusive report, the Associated Press' Jack Gillum and Joan Lowy report that public safety was the ostensible reason for restricting the airspace above Ferguson, Missouri, during large protests following the shooting of a young black man by a white police officer. But the AP, through an Freedom of Information Act request, has exposed recordings in which govermental officials acknowledged the purpose was to keep news helicopters away from the street protests. The recordings "raise serious questions about whether police were trying to suppress aerial images of the demonstrations and the police response by violating the constitutional rights of journalists with tacit assistance by federal officials," the AP further reports.

The PEN American Center is calling on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate how the press was treated by law enforcement covering the protests in Ferguson, Mo., following the death of Michael Brown, the St. Louis Business Journal reports. For example, police held reporters in areas away from the events they were covering and they flashed lights to hinder photographers. PEN American Center is asking the Justice Department "to issue new guidelines for U.S. police departments on respect for media freedoms, including the rights accorded to citizen journalists; take disciplinary measures against any officer responsible for violations; and establish a 'clear policy for the policing of public protests that emphasizes respect for the rights to assembly and freedom of the press,'" St. Business Journal further reports.

Al Tompkins, writing in Poynter, discusses the struggle between reporting on the Ebola epidemic and respecting HIPAA, the law protecting patients' privacy: "A health story of national proportions like the Ebola story pits the role of journalism against HIPPA rules. HIPAA (American Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) restricts patient information to doctors, direct caregivers, insurance companies and others expressly named in the Act." 

HIPPA privacy rules do allow hospitals to release general information about a patient without releasing their names, such as where an infected person traveled, Tompkins reported. Dr. Art Caplan, head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center, told Tompkins that a national health crisis allows public officials to get information in order to be able to trace the contacts a patient had with others. But that loophole doesn't apply to journalists.

Investigative journalist Will Potter is hoping to get around ag gag laws making it illegal to sneak onto agricultural operations by using drones to photograph factory farms from the air, Fast Company reports. He has started a Kickstarter campaign to pay for drones, legal expenses and video production. One thing he hopes to expose are farms that generate meat labeled as "humane" or "free range" "for what they are: big industrial operations," Fast Company also reports.

Many in the burgeoning drone industry are frustrated by the Federal Aviation Administration's glacial pace in issuing new rules to regulate the use of these lightweight flying devices and regulators' application of old rules to ground the use of drones for newsgathering and other commercial purposes. Gigaom's Jeff John Roberts suggests the FAA should use a permit system like the one used for motor vehicles. The CEO of Airware, a startup that provides hardware and software to drone businesses, told Gigaom "the best way to resolve the ongoing legal conflicts involving drones is to designate separate airspaces for manned and unmanned aircraft, including a buffer zone between them. Doing so, he said in a recent phone interview, would permit a more relaxed set of rules for drones. Specifically, [CEO Jonathan] Downey suggested this might involve a permit system where drone owners could obtain a license after passing a test."

Media outlets have filed an amicus brief in support of a drone hobbyist facing a $10,000 fine for using a drone to make a promotional video, Gigaom reports. The media companies argue that the Federal Aviation Administration is violating the First Amendment by banning the use of unmanned aircraft for news photography.

Read the full brief here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/222414475/NYT-Et-Al-Amicus-for-Drones

The implications of a decision by an administrative law judge that the Federal Aviation Administration can't impose a $10,000 fine for the commercial use of a small UAV, or drone, is overstated, C. Andrew Keisner, an attorney writing in TVNewser, says. The FAA will likely proceed to create binding rules for drones under the Administrative Procedure Act, and it is "risky for advertising & media companies engaging UAV operators to enter into any long-term contracts that assume the FAA will not proceed with making whatever binding rules it deems necessary to regulate UAVs," he says.

After Politico reported that Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman says he's been told his telephone records were obtained by a national security letter, Julian Sanchez posted on Just Security that there at least two ways in which a national security letter would appear to strain the limits of the authority from the only NSL statute allowing for access to telecommunications records.

"First, §2709 may only be used in connection with an 'authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities,'" Sanchez writes. "Assuming Bart is not suspected of plotting to blow up any airplanes, it seems probable that we’re dealing here with an investigation of leaks of classified information to press. Yet such leaks—even when they clearly involve a violation of the law—do not obviously satisfy the traditional definition of 'clandestine intelligence activities.'"

Second, Sanchez writes, "a clause added to the NSL provisions by the USA Patriot Act—to compensate for the elimination of the requirement that NSLs target suspected agents of a foreign power—provides that they may be used for an authorized investigation 'provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.' The sole basis for seeking Gellman’s records would, of course, be his First Amendment–protected newsgathering and reporting activities."