Washington Law Review Volume 96 Number 1 3-1-2021 Hacks, Leaks, and Data Dumps: The Right to Publish Illegally Acquired Information Twenty Years After Bartnicki V. Vopper Erik Ugland Christina Mazzeo Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/wlr Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, and the Privacy Law Commons Recommended Citation Erik Ugland & Christina Mazzeo, Hacks, Leaks, and Data Dumps: The Right to Publish Illegally Acquired Information Twenty Years After Bartnicki V. Vopper, 96 Wash. L. Rev. 139 (2021). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Reviews and Journals at UW Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington Law Review by an authorized editor of UW Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Ugland & Mazzeo (Do Not Delete) 3/22/2021 11:58 AM HACKS, LEAKS, AND DATA DUMPS: THE RIGHT TO PUBLISH ILLEGALLY ACQUIRED INFORMATION TWENTY YEARS AFTER BARTNICKI V. VOPPER Erik Ugland* & Christina Mazzeo** Abstract: This Article addresses a fluid and increasingly salient category of cases involving the First Amendment right to publish information that was hacked, stolen, or illegally leaked by someone else. Twenty years ago, in Bartnicki v. Vopper, the Supreme Court appeared to give broad constitutional cover to journalists and other publishers in these situations, but Justice Stevens’s inexact opinion for the Court and Justice Breyer’s muddling concurrence left the boundaries unclear. The Bartnicki framework is now implicated in dozens of new cases— from the extradition and prosecution of Julian Assange, to Donald Trump’s threatened suit of The New York Times over his tax records, to the civil suits spawned by the hack of DNC servers—so there is a pressing need for clarity.