WIRED:The controversy over a missing prototype iPhone has raised issues over Apple's stance towards press freedom, writes DANNY O'BRIEN

ON APRIL 23rd, US police broke down the door of gadget blogger Jason Chen’s home looking for evidence in the mysterious case of a missing secret prototype iPhone.

In good Sherlock Holmes fashion, however, the mystery isn’t how the iPhone went missing.

The real mystery is what exactly were the prosecutors thinking when they wrote the warrant for this break-in.

In their enthusiasm to pursue a headline case in Silicon Valley, they could have ruined their chances for a successful prosecution and embroiled Apple once again in arguments about free speech, the rights of bloggers and its use of the law.

It hardly needs a grand jury investigation to uncover the facts of the iPhone prototype. Earlier this year, an Apple employee, Gray Powell, mislaid his phone at a bar in Redwood City, a few miles from Apple’s Silicon Valley campus.

A few days later, another individual began offering the same phone around local tech news outlets sites like wired.com. The phone appeared to boot up as a normal iPhone but was very different in design from current models, with a new front-facing camera (for video calls), a higher-resolution screen and a built-in flash.

Chen’s site, Gizmodo, bought access to the phone, and conducted a “teardown” of it, where they took it apart and published photographs of its design and components. Eventually, Apple approached the news site and asked for the phone back.

Most of the debate about Gizmodo’s scoop since publication has centred on the ethics of the company’s payment for the prototype phone, and the propriety of publishing details of Apple’s future product.

Online commentators pored over Californian law, which implies that failing to return a lost item can, in many circumstances, be a crime comparable to theft.

Gizmodo’s payment also complicated matters: did they knowingly purchase stolen property?

Matters grew even more heated when, a week later, the cops broke down Chen’s door and seized all of his work computers and hardware.

The police were from the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (or React), a Silicon Valley police force formed to combat “new types of crime tied to our computer-oriented economy and widespread use of the internet”.

React is advised in its mission by, among other companies, Apple.

If – as it turned out – Chen was being investigated for being involved in a theft, perhaps a search warrant was in order.

But unfortunately for React, California law has a very specific provision prohibiting the issuing of warrants for “unpublished information obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public”.

The restriction, aimed at protecting journalists’ sources, has no exemption for cases where the journalists themselves are being investigated.

If React had been doing more than just reacting to the frenzied attention being paid to this case, it would have understood that it could have drafted their search warrant more precisely to avoid being in violation of this part of the reporter’s shield.

After all, whether you think Gizmodo was acting ethically in its pursuit of a scoop or not, it is undeniable that they had blazoned across their blog almost every detail of the alleged transaction. It’s what journalists do, after all.

Another set of journalists at wired.com used Facebook to locate Brian Hogan, the person who sold Gizmodo the phone, a few days later; and it took a combined group of several media outlets to convince the judge to unseal the affidavit, despite the police claiming they had a “confidential informant” to protect.

The informant turned out to be Hogan’s flatmate, who had got nervous following all the media-driven publicity about the case, and called the cops. The judge determined that she was in no danger.

It’s not the first time that an investigation, instigated by Apple, has run against rules protecting a free press.

In an earlier civil case, Apple argued that it could subpoena to find an online journalist’s sources, because bloggers weren’t real journalists, and a story about new Apple projects was not a real story.

The court denied both arguments.

Here, it seems, Apple’s publicity engine encouraged the local police that, because everyone was screaming about Apple’s lost phone, they should treat this as a crime above and beyond that of a single lost prototype.

But as Californian law recognises, a heavily blogged, headline-grabbing story like this means that the police can – and should – exercise more restraint, not less.

The evidence for investigating isn’t hidden away in a seedy Californian lair, liable to be deleted unless the officers break down the door. The evidence is in every Apple fanboy’s news feed.

It’s true that the state of the online free press could be worse. In Hong Kong, a Reuters reporter investigating security at one of Apple’s contractors’ factories was assaulted for taking pictures on a public road.

The same contractor, Foxconn, has faced a rash of suicides in the factories, including one last year from a worker caught up in an investigation over a leaked prototype.

Apple might want to consider whether its own secrecy isn’t attracting the limelight – and the justified investigations, that it tries so hard to avoid.