Sheriff's deputies arrest 'New Times' owners

Michael Lacey, an owner of the Phoenix New Times was arrested Thursday night by Maricopa County sheriff's deputies along with Jim Larkin on charges of revealing grand jury information, a misdemeanor.

Phoenix New Times owners Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin were arrested Thursday night by Maricopa County sheriff's deputies on charges of revealing grand jury information, a misdemeanor.

The charges stem from a story published under their byline in the Thursday edition of New Times, in which they describe a subpoena the paper reportedly received from a grand jury convened by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office.

Lacey has been released from jail after posting bail; there's no jail record available on the status of Larkin. Efforts to reach them Friday have been unsuccessful.

Grand jury proceedings are secret, and the two wondered in the opening paragraphs of the article whether they could face legal repercussions for making the subpoena public, but they viewed the subpoena as an attack on freedom of the press.

The alternative weekly newspaper, in its cover story, said the subpoena was part of an investigation orchestrated to get back at its reporters and the critical stories they wrote of County Attorney Andrew Thomas' political ally Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The scope of the subpoena is unusually broad: It not only demands information from the reporters but also information about all the online readers of the publication since Jan. 1, 2004, including their Internet domain names and browsers and what other Web sites they visited before reading New Times.

Outside the jail this morning, New Times editor Rick Barrs told assembled media that the arrests had been an attack by Thomas' attorney.

"They're trying to muzzle us," Barrs said. "This is retaliation against us. And it's not just retaliation against us, it's retaliation against the press."

"I think that what has gone on here legally is without precedent," Lacey told the Republic earlier in the day, before the arrests. Lacey is executive editor of Village Voice Media, which owns Phoenix New Times and several other papers across the country.

It attempts to put a chill on reporters doing their jobs, he said, and invades the privacy of readers. Lacey says he didn't intend to turn over the information.

The architect of the unprecedented online dragnet is the same private attorney at the center of other recent controversies in the County Attorney's Office.

Dennis Wilenchik has helped Thomas launch a war against Superior Court judges over differences on cases dealing with undocumented immigrants, last week staging an unheard-of confrontation with the court's assistant presiding criminal judge.

The State Bar reports that it is investigating possible ethical complaints against Thomas and Wilenchik in the wake of that incident.

A county attorney spokesman on Thursday night said he could not confirm if Wilenchik had sought the arrests.

The New Times subpoena originates from a series of articles published in 2004 and 2005. Underlying the subpoena is an allegation that the paper had published Arpaio's home address, which the County Attorney's Office alleges is a crime.

The subpoena specifically asks for documents and Web-traffic details related to:

• An article about a defamation suit filed against the sheriff by a political rival.

Records request stirs debate

The Maricopa County Attorney's Office is demanding that Phoenix New Times turn over records relating to anyone who has visited the newspaper's Web site in the past four years.

A grand-jury subpoena asks for Web addresses, shopping habits and information about what Internet sites readers visited before logging onto the New Times.

Legal experts say the subpoena, which also demands reporters' notes and records on stories going back three years, is overreaching and unconstitutional.

But the case raises important issues about privacy and serves as a reminder about the amount of information someone leaves when they use a computer to visit a Web site.

Among the items the subpoena demands are:

• Documents, notes, e-mails and any other material related to a series of articles written by several New Times reporters.

• An accounting of the number of people who viewed each article online.

• A list of every page on the New Times site that users have visited since Jan. 1, 2004. That would include the names of every person who read any story, ad or listing in the paper.

• Any information obtained from "cookies" on the New Times site. Cookies are used to identify and track an individual's computer use. Think of it as an online fingerprint of what you have touched on a specific Internet site.

• The computer domain name of anyone accessing the paper's Web site, phxnewtimes.com. A domain name identifies a computer or computer network used to access the Web.

• All Web sites that readers visited prior to opening the New Times site. That would include any site - bank, social networking, news, information, pornographic - that a reader visited before logging onto New Times.

• The dates and times of all visits to the New Times site.

• The browser used by each New Times reader, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

• The type of operating system software used by each New Times reader.

- Robert Anglen