Confidentiality

The fierce fight over same-sex marriage in California and elsewhere is creating pressure to recognize a new free-speech right that could keep petition signatures secret. The Supreme Court voted last week to block release of the names of more than 138,000 people in Washington state who signed petitions seeking to repeal a same-sex domestic partner law in a ballot scheduled for Nov. 3. The Supreme Court's intervention set off a broad debate among election-law experts and 1st Amendment scholars over what is private and what is public when it comes to politics.

Los Angeles County has paid more than $4 million in the last two years to settle discrimination, harassment and wrongful-termination claims brought by county employees but has never publicly justified the settlements. County supervisors, saying that taxpayers deserved to know why they settle other lawsuits, last year voted to publicly disclose legal evaluations written by county lawyers for each case. But they allowed the attorneys to make an exception for employee-related settlements.

Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said Monday that he supported federal legislation to protect journalists' confidential sources -- a position that puts him at odds with the Bush administration, which contends that the legislation threatens national security.

Most thefts of sensitive information from corporations occur when the victimized companies don't know what data they have, where they have it or who has access to it, according to a study released Wednesday by Verizon Communications Inc. In about two-thirds of the 500 data thefts investigated by Verizon's security unit over the last several years, the targets didn't know what information they were storing or where exactly they were storing it.

When you take a prescription drug, that's between you, your doctor and your pharmacist. No one else has a right to know. Perhaps not for much longer. Under legislation that quietly passed in the state Senate on May 29 and is making its way through the Assembly, drugstores would be free to share patients' prescription records with companies that specialize in bulk mailings. Money would change hands along with people's personal data, but, as you'll see, it's not exactly clear who's paying whom.

The Justice Department has agreed to back off hardball tactics to force corporations to turn over confidential communications between their attorneys and company executives under scrutiny by prosecutors. The new rules, outlined Wednesday in a Justice Department letter to the Senate, further ease tough steps taken after the Enron-era scandals to root out white-collar crime.

Citing a journalist's need to keep news sources confidential, a federal judge in Santa Ana declined Thursday to order a reporter to reveal the names of federal officials who leaked information to him for a 2006 story about a grand jury investigation into a scheme to send sensitive military technology to China. Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz was subpoenaed to testify in federal court by U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney.

A clearly frustrated Los Angeles City Council instructed the office of City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo this week to try to keep information about the location of billboards available to the public. The request, made Wednesday, comes as part of a legal settlement between the city and two billboard firms that sued over a billboard inspection program the council approved in 2002. The settlement with Clear Channel Outdoor Inc. and CBS Outdoor Inc.

In response to growing secrecy surrounding police misconduct, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday urged the Civil Service Commission to stop excluding the sheriff's civilian watchdog from deputy disciplinary hearings.

Many journalists rejoiced at the news Thursday that two San Francisco Chronicle reporters would avoid jail time for refusing to disclose the source who helped them tell the world about the steroid scandal in major league sports. But the celebration was quickly joined -- like so many discussions of the nation's press recently -- by questions about not what the two veteran journalists uncovered, but how they uncovered it.