A week after Gizmodo allegedly paid someone for an alleged next-generation iPhone they found in a bar, California police raided Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's home and seized items including his computer.

Gawker, which owns Gizmodo, is trying to present this as a power-of-the-press situation, saying that the police had no right to get a warrant and dig through Chen's stuff because he is a journalist. Gizmodo has already made some bold claims about the story in the past week, including that they "finally" beat Apple "at their own game."

Here's my un-lawyer-ly opinion: There is a difference between protecting a source and receiving stolen material. And "breaking" a "story" that would be a press release about a new product in a couple of months anyway doesn't feel like a compelling enough reason to break the law. This Gizmodo iPhone story, to me, has always smacked of those young suburban white kids who shoplift DVD boxed sets from Best Buy in order to "fuck the man."