Released Warrant Shows SFPD Started Monitoring Journalist's Phone Weeks Before Officers Raided His Home
Furnished content.
More details have surfaced about the San Francisco Police Department's search of journalist Bryan Carmody's residence. The affidavits for the search of his house remain under seal, but the SFPD's police chief has already admitted these "lacked clarity." This strongly suggests the affidavits didn't mention Carmody's profession to avoid having them rejected for violating California's journalist shield law.Some of this civil liberties-punching paperwork has been released. And it shows the SFPD spent several weeks monitoring Carmody's communications before deciding to bring the rights violations to his doorstep.
San Francisco police obtained a warrant to search a freelance journalist’s phone records and were authorized to “conduct remote monitoring” on the phone more than two months before a controversial raid on his home and office, according to documents released Friday.Officers executed the warrant on Bryan Carmody’s phone records on March 1 — the first of seven search warrants obtained in the investigation into who leaked him a report on the Feb. 22 death of Public Defender Jeff Adachi.There's no extended affidavit attached to the warrant [PDF], but the short description of the investigation makes no mention of Bryan Carmody's line of work. All it does is claim Carmody is suspected to be involved in the theft of the leaked police report detailing public defender Jeff Adachi's death.
Nature of investigation: Mr. Carmody is being investigated as a co-conspirator in the theft of the San Francisco Police report, involving the death investigation of Jeff Adachi. The criminal investigation focuses on the conspiracy to commit a crime, the theft of a police report, and the willful obstruction of justice.This part of the warrant says the SFPD is only seeking phone records spanning two days in February. But on the next page, the court authorizes ongoing "remote monitoring" of Carmody's phone "until the conclusion of the investigation." This includes signals produced in "locations not open to the public or visual surveillance."This warrant wasn't handed to the SF Chronicle by the court or the SFPD, but rather by Bryan Carmody, who was finally notified of this particular search three months after it happened.The warrant also shows the SFPD had Carmody in its sights long before most of the public was aware he was the source of the leaked death report obtained by other reporters. As the Chronicle's article points out, the first public statement on Carmody's involvement came during a Board of Supervisors meeting in April in which the city's public defender's office revealed this information. The phone monitoring warrant was granted on March 1st, only days after news stations published the leaked document.Every new development makes the SFPD look worse. The department may not be making the hole any deeper at this point, but its prior groundwork has proven to have created a far deeper hole than early estimates indicated.
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