From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Last week, an Apple employee inadvertently left a prototype Next Generation iPhone on a bar stool.

Oops.

Another patron, who later came forward, found it and then sold it for $5,000 to the tech blog Gizmodo,

which then published a detailed dissection of the phone, which is due out this summer.

Sounds like a walks-in-the-bar joke, but Apple wasn't laughing and nor were the cops.

On Monday, California's rapid

enforcement allied computer team broke down the door of Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen and seized

his computers. Gizmodo, in turn, invoked California's shield law for journalists. Shield

laws, which vary from state to state, are designed to protect

whistleblowers by allowing reporters to withhold the identities of their sources. When Gizmodo invoked

the shield law, the San Mateo district attorney, who had ordered the seizure, put the search

of the computers on hold. Meanwhile, back east, New York Times reporter James

Risen was issued a federal grand jury subpoena to reveal sources for his book about the CIA.

Should a tech blogger and a national security correspondent be equally deserving of shield

law protections? George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley says, maybe not in these two cases.

For many years, there's been an acceptance that there's some limitation to shield laws.

You can't possibly claim that no matter what a journalist does, he can't be forced to produce evidence. That would

allow journalists to become the world's most successful bank robbers. So there's always been an

exception with regard to criminal acts that were committed or participated in by reporters.

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