This is not the country you were told you live in

Bryan Carmody, a freelance reporter in San Francisco, awoke Friday to the sounds of someone trying to break into his house.

About 10 officers from the San Francisco Police Department were bashing the front gate of his home in the Outer Richmond neighborhood with a sledgehammer, he said. It was just after 8 o’clock in the morning.

Carmody called out and said he would let them into the house. The officers showed him a search warrant and proceeded to go through his home — from “top to bottom” he says — with their guns drawn.

[...]

Two weeks before, police investigators showed up at his home to ask him, politely he says, to identify the source who provided him with a confidential police report about the February death of the city’s public defender, Jeff Adachi. Carmody, who said he worked with three local television news stations on the story, declined.

[...]

“I’m smart enough not to talk to federal agents, ever,” Carmody said. “I just kept saying ‘lawyer, lawyer, lawyer.' ”

So he stayed handcuffed for the next six hours, he says — a certificate of release from the police department that he distributed says he was in custody from 8:22 a.m. until 1:55 p.m. — as investigators searched his home, then his office, where they found the report in a safe.

[...]

Carmody says his ability to work is now crippled by the seizure of his electronics. A search warrant and affidavit he distributed noted that police took at least at least four tablets, seven computers, 10 hard drives, a dozen phones, two cameras, reporters’ notebooks and a thumb drive from his home.

[...]

Carmody said he had never been pressured by law enforcement to give up a source before in 29 years of reporting — mentioning as an example the leaked photographs from San Francisco’s public transportation agency he recently acquired that exposed a safety issue with some trains.

[...]

He said he believed he was being targeted because he was a freelancer, noting that details in the police report had appeared in other publications, such as the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I don’t think there was a police raid at the Chronicle with a sledgehammer yesterday,” he said.

  WaPo