It is the Senate’s last chance to pass the PRESS Act

Americans: Your senators are just weeks away from passing the PRESS Act, the federal “shield” bill that passed the House with unanimous and bipartisan support in early January but has been waiting in the Senate for a final vote ever since.

The PRESS Act, if passed into law, would include national protections for journalists across the United States from being forced to identify or give up their confidential sources (except in emergency situations, such as preventing an act of terrorism). The bill also offers other protections, such as limiting what records the government can secretly take from reporters or their email or telephone providers who can identify their sources — again, with a narrow set of exceptions for urgent threats.

Lawmakers have been seeking to extend journalistic protections in the PRESS Act for the past year, citing recent U.S. government abuses. A recent example was the secret seizure of phone records from reporters working for CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post at the request of the Justice Department under the Trump administration, in order to identify the source of the leak.

As recently noted by The Verge, protections for journalists and their sources will become increasingly effective in Trump’s second term.

Forcing journalists to change the identity of a source can have a negative impact on news gathering. People will feel discouraged from talking to journalists, which hurts the public’s ability to be informed about things that affect them. We also share our stories with independent journalists and small outlets, who may not have the legal resources to fight government subpoenas for their records. The PRESS Act would provide uniform protections to journalists across the United States and would also include independent journalists and outlets that publish information in the public interest.

Although the bill does not directly affect the technology industry, as a news source, TechCrunch is in favor of protecting and building on press freedom. Some of TechCrunch’s most read and impactful reports come from readers like you, who have reached out and reported on corporate wrongdoing, uncovering first-world mismanagement, detailing human rights abuses, and exposing massive data breaches and breaches, computer attacks, and crimes that might otherwise go unreported. TechCrunch has a history of resisting legal demands to protect our resources. We can only do this through the protection of press freedom.

At this point, the PRESS Act already has bipartisan support in the Senate, with Senators Ron Wyden, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Dick Durbin as co-sponsors. But as The Times reports, the bill is still stuck in the Senate Judiciary Committee, reportedly opposed by a small group of senators. As with Congress, a single dissenter can hold up the legislative process indefinitely.

The bill is awaiting a final vote on the Senate floor, weeks before the bill expires at the end of the congressional session. The ACLU has a simple web form you can use to send a note to your senators, or you can call or email directly to ask them to vote for the PRESS Act.