NYT Editorial: The FBI has better thnings to do than rifle through Jack Anderson's files

Over four decades as one of Washington's most famous investigative journalists, Jack Anderson and his staff amassed thousands of documents that a lot of top officials wanted to keep secret. Mostly, they concerned embarrassing missteps or were leaks by whistle-blowers who saw things going wrong and wanted to tell somebody. But now, only a few months after Mr. Anderson's death, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to paw through 188 boxes of Mr. Anderson's old files to look for documents they say might have been classified somewhere along the line as secret.

The Anderson family has rightly refused to allow the F.B.I. unfettered access to these papers, arguing that such an intrusion would betray Mr. Anderson's principles as a journalist and amount to a fishing expedition that could intimidate other journalists (and their sources). As the family put it in a letter to the F.B.I., if the columnist were alive "he would resist the government's efforts with all the energy he could muster."

F.B.I. officials say "no private person" may possess classified documents provided to that person "illegally." That sounds as though some in the administration are trying to turn the old and ambiguous Espionage Act into something approaching an official secrets act. It raises fears of a government merely stamping something secret and making it illegal for a journalist to possess it.