The popular Malaysian blogger has been ordered to reveal his sources for allegations he made in the Anwar Ibrahim sodomy scandal:

Shafee said the court also ordered Raja Petra, who writes for his No Holds Barred column, to remove the contentious postings and to refrain from publishing similar allegations. Raja Petra is already facing charges of sedition and criminal defamation over an article and a sworn statement he made alleging links between the country's deputy prime minister and a murdered Mongolian woman. But Raja Petra said on Thursday he will not reveal his sources and denied knowing the identity of people who post comments on his blog. "Of course, I won't. I never reveal my sources," he said.

If you think this can't happen in America, it most certainly can. Remember, there is no federal shield law for journalists, and even if there was, many have argued that bloggers shouldn't be included.

Here's one of Raja Petra's articles alleging that Shafee Abdullah is behind the sodomy allegations, using them to gain the national Attorney General position:

Shafee’s hands are behind the whole thing. And this can only happen with Abdullah’s blessing. No, it is not Mahathir who is behind this. And it is not Abdullah, Najib and Anwar who are the three victims. The victims are Mahathir, Najib and Anwar. Abdullah is the hidden hand and Shafee is the henchman who was tasked with the job of implementing the evil deed. Politics is not what it always appears to be in Malaysia. That is how Malay politics is played out.

The idea of an ambitious politico using a sex scandal is hardly unique to any one country, but the issue isn't really about what Raja Petra is saying in and of itself. If it is bullshit (and I have no idea one way or another), Petra is on the hook for serious libel and defamation claims, just as he would be here in America. But if he's telling the truth, and has corroborated these allegations through investigation and extensive sourcing, how does that make him any different from a typical journalist? And why, then, should he not be protected from "outing" his sources and ruining their careers (and possibly lives) along with his? If he is wrong or lying, he loses his reputation and standing in the Malaysian community, but if he's right, should he not be able to access sources off-the-record the same way any Beltway pundit would, without fear of reprisal?

This is not the first time Petra has brushed with the law over writing articles deemed "seditious," but which largely seem to be controversial due to his criticisms of governmental shenanigans and wrongdoing. Petra is something of a folk hero in Malaysia, and his writing is deemed pivotal to the political shakeups that have led to Ibrahim's path to power in the first place. We in America tend to take the First Amendment too much for granted, not realizing how easily something so fragile and yet so powerful as the right to speak freely without fear of censorship can be removed. Indeed, too often we willingly give away the right to speak, when we say things like "Corporations are private entities and are allowed to censor you," or "We need to restrict some speech to keep people safe, or to protect national security."  And thus the slippery slope goes, but I digress.

Some states are recognizing that bloggers need the same protections as journalists and are acting accordingly. When you look at the type of real boots-on-the-ground journalism done by TPM, Raw Story, HuffPo, OpenLeft, and a million other blogs, the line between "blogger" and "journalist" is a thin one indeed, and on either side, both deserve the full protection of the law from being thumbscrewed into revealing their sources. Private should stay private, no matter what country you're in.