Privacy

Business executives under investigation or being questioned about price fixing practices -- but not yet charged -- will no longer be publicly named in corporate plea agreement documents submitted to courts by the Department of Justice.

The new policy will also completely exclude from plea agreements the names of employees who are not cooperating with the price-fixing or bid-rigging investigation, as well as those who can’t be tracked down or are still being investigated. If they are charged, their names will be made public.

The identity of an anonymous blogger sued for defamation does not have to be disclosed, according to the Michigan Court of Appeals.

The appeals court ruled last week that a lower court erred when it refused to protect the anonymous identity of the blogger known only as “Rockstar05.” The trial judge incorrectly applied law from outside the state when it should have used Michigan law addressing anonymous online commenters, the appeals court stated.

The Senate Judiciary Committee Friday unanimously approved a “very overdue” bill that would require law enforcement officials to get a warrant before accessing e-mail messages, updating a dated privacy law.

The proposed amendments are historic and will create a consistent method for handling government access to online communications, said Sophia Cope, director of government affairs at the Newspaper Association of America. But the measure likely won’t go to the Senate this year, forcing the process to start over again next year, she said.

Paula Broadwell isn’t the only person whose Gmail messages were read by government officials – Google received almost 8,000 e-mail access requests from U.S. state and federal governments in the past six months, according to the latest Google Transparency Report.

Google fully or partially granted 90 percent of the requests made by federal, state and local U.S. governments, according to the report. The requests by stateside governments account for more than a third of requests worldwide.

Chicago City Hall officials violated Illinois' strict eavesdropping law when they ‘inadvertently’ recorded conversations with Chicago Tribune reporters without their consent.

The Tribune sent the city a letter Friday demanding that officials stop secretly recording conversations with reporters. The newspaper also requested copies of the recorded conversations.