An Ontario Court judge must decide whether it’s legal or not to disclose information about wiretaps once that information has been used by police in secret proceedings to obtain search warrants.

If the judge sides with lawyers for the Star and other media outlets, released documents could further reveal whether there are links between Mayor Rob Ford and alleged guns and drug traffickers.

Since June, the Star, the Globe & Mail and CBC have been fighting to make public one of the search warrants Toronto police used to carry out Project Traveller — a series of raids that targeted alleged gang members in Toronto’s Dixon Rd. community as well as Windsor and Edmonton.

The Crown is arguing that most of the information sought — which Justice Philip Downes in July ordered released in a redacted form to media lawyers — can’t be revealed because doing so would be illegal.

Sources told the Star that during surveillance for Project Traveller, police became aware of a video, seen by Star reporters in May, that appears to show Ford smoking crack cocaine.

The mayor also appeared with three men in an infamous photograph linked to the raids: one later shot and killed; another injured in the same incident and later arrested in Project Traveller; and a third also swept up in the raid. The photograph was taken outside a crack house that was also the target of a Project Traveller search warrant.

On Thursday, Justice Philip Downes heard arguments from lawyers for the media and the Crown over what sections of the information used to obtain one of those warrants should be made public.

More than 90 of 114 pages Downes ordered released to the media lawyers were redacted.

One section was withheld because it reveals a police investigative technique. But most of the information was kept secret, said Crown attorney Jeffrey Levy, because it would be a criminal offence to disclose information gleaned from wiretaps.

“Those cannot be disclosed to anybody,” Levy said. “There’s no discretion in the court to do so.”

Levy later added he could face two years behind bars for inappropriately disclosing the information. “I don’t want to go to jail,” he said.

Lawyers for the media argued that the section of the Criminal Code that the Crown used to support its argument actually allows for the release of that information, once it has been disclosed by a police officer to obtain a search warrant. They have also argued the public has an inherent right to view information used to obtain search warrants.

“This isn’t an issue of disclosure; this is an issue of public access to court proceedings,” said Ryder Gilliland, lawyer for the Star. “The public has the right to scrutinize what happened.”

Peter Jacobsen, who is representing all other media outlets, also raised concerns about court transparency and the difficulty of learning how many search warrants were executed as part of Project Traveller, and where.

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“We’ve got no cooperation from the Crown,” Jacobsen said. “It’s the Crown’s approach to this which has been totally secretive.”

Downes said he hoped to deliver a decision on whether the information can be disclosed by Monday. The matter will be heard again Sept. 20 — the earliest any of the search warrant information could be made public.