Freedom of the Press Foundation

The Digital Security Digest, by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), is a weekly newsletter with security tips that keep you, your sources, and your devices safe. If someone shared this newsletter with you, please subscribe here. Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month to those who celebrate! In this month of information safety scares, Canadian members of Parliament are once again pushing a controversial surveillance bill.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: New York, Oct. 14, 2026 — Judge Timothy Kelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., delivered a decisive loss to President Trump for a second time yesterday evening, extending his previous order restraining the administration from barring CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Washington, D.C., Oct. 13, 2026 — Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) led a letter from a coalition of rights organizations to Maryland Gov. Wes Moore demanding he cease his troubling practice of sending routine inquiries from Sinclair-owned media outlets into legal review black holes, citing a personal defamation case against him by Sinclair Chairman David Smith.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom, I’m Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), and welcome to The Classifieds. Read on to learn about the week’s top secrecy news. The Department of Homeland Security paid the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office nearly $15 million for just seven immigration arrests.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: New York, Oct. 10, 2026 — The Department of Justice is investigating whether ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News violated federal antitrust laws when the networks briefly suspended their pooled coverage of President Donald Trump, according to The New York Times. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern issued the following statement: “The investigation is nonsense.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom: Trump’s Department of Justice is invoking national security in new, dangerous ways to go after the press. Plus, an Alabama university cracks down on free speech on the radio, while conservatives, along with everyone else, continue to tire of Brendan Carr’s censorship schemes.

The Digital Security Digest, by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), is a weekly newsletter with security tips that keep you, your sources, and your devices safe. If someone shared this newsletter with you, please subscribe here. Starting with iOS 18.1, released in late 2024, Apple introduced a simple but potent security feature to iPhones. When it has not been unlocked for more than 72 hours, your iPhone will automatically reboot. Why does this matter?

Dear Friend of Press Freedom, I’m Lauren Harper, the first Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), and welcome to The Classifieds. Read on to learn about the week’s top secrecy news. What’s a reasonable fee for a local police department to charge a journalist asking for records about a single cop? If you guessed anything lower than $2.5 million, you’d be wrong — at least according to the city of Eugene, Oregon.

Dear Friend of Press Freedom: We’re doubling up on webinars next week — read more below, and register for both. Plus, police in Oregon responded to a simple public records request with invoices for over $2.5 million. And a new lawsuit reveals that the feds scoured journalist Tim Burke’s Google and Twitter accounts after raiding his home back in 2023 and that — as with this year’s raid of the Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson — they failed to tell the judge about the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.

Federal agents secretly searched Florida journalist Tim Burke’s Google and Twitter accounts in 2023, a new lawsuit filed by Burke on Sept. 22 reveals. At the same time, the government failed to tell a judge who approved those searches about a federal law that specifically limits searches of journalists’ materials.