Yang memory running low?

For legal journalists, the advent of the Internet is largely seen as a good thing — in places where court filings are online, we can get them faster, report them sooner, and monitor docket filings in something close to real time.

NINTH CIRCUIT in HAWAII Reporter Justin Scheck blogs from the appeals court’s annual conference in Honolulu.

Of course, some who work within the court system see it differently. At a Tuesday panel discussion at the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference entitled “Secrecy in the Electronic Age,” a judge, a media advocate, a court administrator and a former U.S. attorney sorted through some of the issues.

The program began with a demonstration of the wide array of information that can be revealed by a simple Google search, and much of the discussion that followed was unsurprising — San Diego bankruptcy court clerk Barry Lander, for example, has found it confusing to reconcile open access to records (which, by law, include debtors’ Social Security numbers) with federal laws that protect individual privacy. And senior Los Angeles Federal Judge Terry Hatter has concerns about witnesses and jurors being endangered when their identities are publicized.

Then there was Debra Wong Yang, the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner who was L.A. U.S. attorney from 2002 to 2006.

Despite her firm’s advocacy on behalf of media outlets making First Amendment claims, Yang on Tuesday seemed uncomfortable with transparency.

For one thing, she wants to keep plea deals confidential for as long as possible, in part, she said, to protect snitches when they go to jail. “It causes security problems when you’re incarcerated because you don’t want that label,” she said. Yang also questioned why journalists should have the right to know jurors’ names.

But perhaps her discomfort with the press — and with modern technology — was best illustrated by an anecdote she told to illustrate the perils of e-filing.

ALSO at the CONFERENCE: Ha ha, the nice man from the White House mocks people who think federal drug policy is a mess. Silly, silly majority of the judiciary. Judge Stephen Trott’s original Highwaymen played a gig. Big-time plaintiff lawyer and vinter Frederick Furth takes his Great Dane on the longest walk ever. Oh, and the judges suggest a pay raise — at least in line with the cost of living — would not be entirely out of order.

“We had a situation where we had put something that was redacted electronically into the electronic filing system, and someone had managed to hack into the system and unredact what we had redacted,” she said.

Hackers breaking into court computers to reveal confidential information? It surely sounded like nefarious business.

Perhaps not. Yang’s description of the June 2006 episode — which occurred during the probe of grand jury leaks in the BALCO steroids case — may have been better informed by a simple Google search.

It took only a few moments for us to find an Associated Press story by two reporters who had a different take on what happened with the document.

“Sections of Wednesday's government filing were electronically blacked out to protect what prosecutors said was sensitive material concerning the grand jury's investigation,” the story says. “But those passages are revealed when the document is pasted into a word processing program — a glitch that the prosecutors could have easily prevented by properly formatting the .pdf file.

And while Yang may remember it differently, her office at the time acknowledged as much. According to the AP story, “Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for federal prosecutors in Los Angeles, who are conducting the leak probe, said the government committed an 'unfortunate error, one that we regret' for failing to properly hide the blacked-out material."

Of course, it's only fair to Yang that we point out her disappointment in this very medium. In the past, she said, traditional media outlets followed a well-defined set of ethical rules. But now, she lamented, "even the main ones have their own Web sites, and bloggers."

— Justin Scheck