California: Anarchist blogger stays in prison, defying grand jury order

by Demian Bulwa

Blogger and anarchist Josh Wolf, spending his 57th day in federal prison today for refusing to surrender video he shot of a violent San Francisco protest, is well on his way to becoming the longest-jailed journalist in U.S. history.

To the government, the 24-year-old San Franciscan is hindering a federal grand jury investigation into serious crimes -- an attack on a police officer who suffered a fractured skull during the July 2005 rally and the attempted burning of his patrol car.

To Wolf and his supporters, including prominent press organizations, he is the latest victim of a Bush administration assault on journalists and is being punished because he won't help a law enforcement fishing expedition. Wolf says he didn't even film the crimes in question.

But Wolf's case features its own thorny questions. Among them are where the line between journalist and activist is drawn, and which side of that line Wolf is on. Another is whether federal agents are using the investigation into the rally as part of a broader attack on the anarchist movement, as Wolf contends.

The standoff was brought into sharper focus last week when an attorney for Wolf described for The Chronicle the portions of the video that Wolf has withheld from the grand jury since being called to testify in February. Wolf had posted an edited version on the Internet, parts of which were shown in television news reports after the protest.

The attorney, Martin Garbus, said the footage does not depict the crimes in question, but features interviews with about 10 protesters who shed masks to speak into Wolf's camera lens.

"They expected he would safeguard them, which is what he is doing," Garbus said. "When they take off the masks and talk to this guy, they're assuming it will not be shown in a hostile place," such as a grand jury room.

FBI spokesman Joseph Schadler said Wolf's footage could help investigators even if it doesn't show a police officer being clubbed or someone trying to burn a squad car. If the government found potential witnesses, Schadler said, "that's a huge difference from a fishing expedition for anarchists."

In a telephone interview from the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, Wolf said he could not surrender the video because he would be acting as an arm of law enforcement, damaging relationships with sources. He also questioned the government's motives.

If he screened the video for the grand jury, he said, "They would say, 'Do you know this person, or this person, or this person?' They would then take all those people and call them into the grand jury, the same way the House Un-American Activities Committee did to create a list of Communists."

Asked if he would testify in front of a grand jury under any circumstance, Wolf said, "I feel that secret courts are antithetical to democracy," but declined to give a direct answer.

Wolf's saga began July 8, 2005, when anarchists led a rally in the Mission District against an economic summit taking place in Scotland. Protesters lit fireworks, pulled news racks into streets and confronted police. Two men and a woman were arrested.

According to a police report, Officer Peter Shields and his partner encountered a group of masked rioters and, outnumbered, tried to drive off. But a protester placed a large Styrofoam sign under their car, disabling it, the report said.

Then, while separated from his partner, Shields was struck on the head with a blunt object that fractured his skull, the report said.

Protesters "ignited pyrotechnic devices" under the patrol car "in an attempt to ignite the entire vehicle," the report said. The car did not burn. The report says it suffered a damaged taillight but was "drivable."

The next day, Wolf posted footage on his video blog, www.josh wolf.net, where he described himself as an "artist, an activist, an anarchist and an archivist." The longest segment showed Shields' partner trying to hold down the protester who had allegedly shoved the Styrofoam under the car.

Wolf wrote on his blog, "I think that this was a case of wrong place and wrong time for actions which may at some point be necessary but at this point were nothing but childish random acts of anarchy that serve no purpose but to further divide the community. I feel that the issue of the cop that was injured was one of collective self-defense or mutual aid. I neither condemn nor condone the action of whoever struck the blow."

Wolf and his lawyers say Shields was assaulted while Wolf was busy filming his partner -- an assertion that appears to be consistent with the police report. The partner reported that he was arresting the protester when he heard a call of an officer down.

In an interview, Wolf said he had seen a smoldering piece of Styrofoam near the patrol car when he walked up to it, but had not pointed his camera at it. "It was a nonevent," he said.

Wolf also posted his video at in dybay.org, a media collective that has in the past been monitored by police. And he sold a "selected portion" to KRON-TV, he wrote, "in an attempt to steer KRON's story toward a more balanced outlook of the event."

Within days, records show, San Francisco police asked the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force for help in finding out who assaulted Shields. According to Wolf, a police inspector and two FBI agents visited him at his home and asked him to hand over his tape, but he refused. Later, he was subpoenaed.

Wolf said his visitors asked broad questions about anarchists and whether he routinely filmed them.

Wolf's subsequent incarceration -- he spent August behind bars at the order of U.S. District Judge William Alsup, was freed during his initial appeal, then returned to prison Sept. 22 -- comes at a time of alarm for freedom-of-the-press advocates. Federal prosecutors also are trying to imprison Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada for refusing to reveal who provided confidential grand jury testimony in the steroid probe involving the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative.

Wolf wound up behind bars because U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan's office, rather than local prosecutors, pursued the case. Normally, assaults and arsons are state crimes, and in California a journalist would be protected by the state's shield law from testifying about his sources.

Federal prosecutors got around that, however, by saying the arson of a police car would be a federal crime because the Police Department gets funding from Washington. There is no law protecting journalists from cooperating with federal grand juries.

Ryan spokesman Luke Macaulay said the case was not taken over by federal prosecutors to gain Wolf's video. He said the grand jury is focused only on events at the rally but is "not restricted to the charge of attempted arson of a police vehicle."

To Wolf's defenders, the case reinforces the need for a federal shield law.

"This is yet another sign that the government doesn't understand what journalists do," said Gregg Leslie, legal defense director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He said Wolf risks being "seen as an agent of the police and the state," which would destroy his credibility and could put him in danger.

Leslie said Wolf's sympathy for the protesters did not make him less of a journalist, as long as he did not have a hand in organizing the rally.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, dismissed Wolf's credentials. In a footnote to its decision last month noting that reporters have no special immunity from federal grand jury subpoenas, the judges said Wolf wouldn't qualify for protection under California's shield law because he wasn't employed by a newspaper, magazine or wire service -- a point that Wolf says ignores the changing media landscape.

"The notion that I needed to be under contract by a major media outlet is preposterous," Wolf said. "What is a journalist? There's no journalist license. The easiest way I can see of judging a journalist is whether his peers judge him to be a journalist."

But not all journalists believe Wolf is doing the right thing.

Reporters have parted with unaired video footage before, and in Wolf's case, "martyrdom might be avoided with a little common sense," said Mark Feldstein, a longtime television reporter who is now an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Without a strong reason to defy the grand jury, such as the protection of confidential sources, Wolf should find a way to compromise and release the video, Feldstein said -- perhaps by posting it in full on his video blog.

Wolf said he has no plans to release the video. Unless there is a major shift in the case, he faces the possibility of becoming the longest-jailed journalist ever in the United States, surpassing Vanessa Leggett, a Texas true-crime author jailed for 168 days in 2001 for refusing to identify her sources to a federal grand jury investigating a homicide.

Wolf could be jailed until July, when the term of the grand jury ends.

"It's not all that bad," he said. "The worst part is not being able to go outside when I want a breath of fresh air, and not being able to listen to the kind of music I like to listen to. Being a slave to AM/FM radio is not the same as having my iPod."

Wolf said work on his next project isn't hindered by his surroundings. He wants to create a blog for prisoners.