A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled on Tuesday, November 10, that the Justice Department's demand for 18 months of LinkedIn records belonging to journalists at an unidentified news outlet was substantially overbroad, and sent the case back to a federal district court in Virginia to narrow the order. Writing for the panel, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said the government's Disclosure Order and the accompanying Secrecy Order infringed the First Amendment rights of LinkedIn and its users, in a ruling issued in a leak investigation that has played out largely under seal.

Source: Reason

"Confidentiality of sources is the lifeblood of a free press," Wilkinson wrote. "Without confidentiality, the ability of journalists to report on events of large importance and governmental behavior of dubious legality and integrity could not help but be hampered." The court affirmed the district court's orders in part, reversed them in part and remanded the case, according to the published opinion in the matter, docketed as No. 26-4303. Wilkinson, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, was joined by Judge James Andrew Wynn and Judge Nicole G. Berner.

Source: TheWrap

What the government asked LinkedIn to hand over

The case grows out of a years-long Justice Department investigation into a national security leak. The government alleges that an unnamed news outlet published an article purporting to describe a top-secret United States military operation in a foreign country and revealed classified information that had never previously been reported. Neither the outlet, the article nor the journalists are identified in the court's ruling, the Associated Press reported.

Acting under the Stored Communications Act — the federal law that restricts when digital service providers may share users' electronic communications and records with the government — prosecutors obtained a Disclosure Order requiring LinkedIn to assemble and divulge the targeted journalists' metadata records over an 18-month period, including the records of every user those journalists interacted with. A Justice Department lawyer told the court at oral argument that prosecutors sought details of about 1,900 LinkedIn interactions involving six users, Politico reported. Metadata does not include the content of messages, but it can show who communicated with whom, and when — which is exactly how a confidential source can be identified.

Prosecutors also obtained a Secrecy Order that prohibited LinkedIn from divulging the existence of the Disclosure Order to the targeted journalists, the news outlet, or anyone else, for one year. U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Hanes, of the Eastern District of Virginia, approved the orders. The district court case was filed on November 6, 2025, and Judge Hanes ruled against LinkedIn on June 3, 2026, before the company appealed to the Fourth Circuit, which sits in Richmond, Virginia.

Why the appeals court pushed back

LinkedIn challenged the orders in November 2025 as overbroad under both the Stored Communications Act and the First Amendment. It asked the court to narrow the Secrecy Order so that it could inform a single, previously government-vetted lawyer for the news outlet about the Disclosure Order, and then work with that lawyer to identify ways to narrow what had to be produced. The government argued that LinkedIn had no standing to bring the claim and could not assert the First Amendment interests of the journalists it was targeting.

The Fourth Circuit disagreed. The court found that LinkedIn had suffered three kinds of sufficient injury in fact, and Wilkinson wrote that it should have been obvious that the Secrecy Order prevented the targeted journalists and the outlet from asserting their own First Amendment interests because it kept them entirely in the dark. The court also reasoned that LinkedIn's relationship with its users would be damaged if journalists stopped using the platform to communicate with confidential sources because of the order, and it rejected the government's argument that a platform with more than 1 billion members could not have a sufficiently close relationship with its users to argue on their behalf.

At the same time, the panel did not shut the investigation down. Wilkinson wrote that the national security interests in the case were self-evident, but that the government's entitlement to a disclosure order did not give it carte blanche to obtain records irrelevant to the investigation. "Serious security and speech claims are in tension in this case," he wrote. "There is space under law for both." The court did not grant LinkedIn's request to quash the order entirely.

Background: a sealed case, and a wider fight over reporters' records

The ruling does not identify the article or the news organization at the centre of the leak probe. Reporting by The New York Times raised the possibility that the case involves a known leak inquiry into a 2019 Times article disclosing a botched military operation in North Korea — a link the court itself did not confirm, and which Awaaz Punjab is reporting only as an unconfirmed possibility raised by that reporting.

The decision lands in a longer-running conflict between leak investigators and the press over data held by technology platforms. Reason's account of the ruling notes that in January 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant for data from Donald Trump's Twitter account, now X, together with a nondisclosure order barring X from notifying him, and that the Supreme Court declined to hear X's appeal in October 2024. Reason also reported that during the second Trump administration the Justice Department has raided reporters' homes and seized electronic devices in leak investigations, subpoenaed reporters at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post over Iran war reporting, and that in July Attorney General Todd Blanche authorized grand jury subpoenas to several New York Times reporters over stories about the Qatari-donated Air Force One. Blanche has disputed accusations that his department is targeting reporters, likening its treatment of them to that of a material witness to a car crash.

What happens next

The case now returns to Judge Hanes in the Eastern District of Virginia. On remand, the district court must consider the government's need for the Disclosure Order, whether every record sought is relevant or whether the request can be narrowed, and the First Amendment and Stored Communications Act standards the panel identified. The Justice Department will have to explain why LinkedIn's narrower proposal — telling a single government-vetted lawyer for the outlet — would compromise its investigation; if the government cannot make that case convincingly, the appeals court said, the district court will have to adopt LinkedIn's proposal to narrow the Secrecy Order. No statement from the Justice Department on the ruling had appeared in the reporting reviewed as of Wednesday, November 11, and whether the government will seek further review had not been announced. For journalists — including Punjabi and other diaspora reporters who rely on platforms like LinkedIn to reach sources — the ruling means a leak investigation can still reach their records, but not in a blanket sweep of a year and a half of their professional contacts.