[pohl]

You are mistaken that I am second-guessing them. While one could argue that the shield law provides "extra protection under the law" in violation of the 14th amendment to the constitution, this is not my opinion.

My opinion, rather, has to do with the distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. The spirit of the shield law is was never to allow a journalist to commit a felony and evade discovery. Rather, its spirit was to allow a journalist to protect sources who may have committed a crime.

(And, even then, shield laws won't protect a journalist from being jailed - despite a shield law - for contempt of court. Judith Miller, a NYT reporter, was jailed for 3 months for refusing to reveal, to the government probe, the source of the leak of Valerie Plame's identity.)

Admittedly, the current case is a mixture of the two, because it's possible that the source committed one felony, and some folks at Gizmodo committed another.

I'm not saying that the search warrant should have been allowed. I was just responding to the alarmism about the hypothetical police chief run amok.