A. That's how I read it too. B. You can be criminally liable for HIPAA violations, if you induce someone covered by them to violate them. See for example https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/media/1254226/dl (indictment of KEITH RITSON)
"COUNT 2
(Conspiracy to Wrongfully Obtain and Disclose
Individually Identifiable Health Information)
19. Paragraphs 1-3 and 5-18 of Count 1 of this Superseding Information are
hereby realleged and incorporated as though set forth in full herein.
20. At all times relevant to this Superseding Information:
a. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996
(“HIPAA”) protects individually identifiable health information from wrongful
disclosure or obtainment and seeks to set national standards to maintain patient
confidentiality.
b. In connection with HIPAA, the United States Department of
Health and Human Services enacted regulations to safeguard the privacy of patients’
medical records and limit circumstances in which individually identifiable health
information or protected health information can be used or disclosed. The HIPAA law
and privacy regulations apply to, among others, health care providers, such as medical
doctors, who transmit health information in connection with a transaction covered by
the law and privacy regulations.
c. Frank Alario, who is listed as a co-conspirator with respect to
Count 2 of this Superseding Information but not as a defendant herein, was a health
care provider and a covered entity under the HIPAA law and privacy regulations.
21. From in or about August 2014 through in or about February 2016, in the
District of New Jersey, and elsewhere, defendant
KEITH RITSON
did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with Frank Alario and others to
commit offenses against the United States, that is, to knowingly and without
authorization obtain individually identifiable health information and protected health
information to another person, and to knowingly and without authorization disclose
individually identifiable health information and protected health information
maintained by a covered entity relating to individuals, contrary to Title 42, United
States Code, Section 1320d-6."
Is there a fact pattern where Lim could have bank-shot criminal liability despite not herself being a covered entity? Probably? She could have misrepresented who she was and obtained the records through fraud, for instance. Again, my thing here is, if you're going to put those kinds of accusations on the table, and you're a district attorney, you'd better come correct. The facts presented in the document the DA's office shared are not sufficient to allege wrongdoing by Lim.
If you induce someone to violate HIPAA who is covered by it (like say a nurse at a hospital), you can be criminally liable. There is no carve-out for journalists. BOTH the person who gave the record and the person who induced them to give it could be liable (not in the same way, possibly). In any case, you seemed to think there was a bright line rule of some sort, that "At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters)." when in fact you can be criminally liable for inducement/conspiracy etc if you induce someone who is covered to give you those records, under https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1320d-6
Here is another similar case of a non-medical person violating HIPAA.
No, I don't think I will. Reporters covering public policy matters and obtaining records from covered entities have First Amendment protection arguments that a conspiracy among insiders and external mules to sell health information don't have. But none of this is my point. I'm not arguing that it would be impossible for Boudin's office to allege wrongdoing. I'm arguing that they failed to do so. Like, a really basic thing: where'd she get the X-Rays from? The allegation doesn't say.
I'm commenting on the specific thing Boudin's office (inexplicably) wrote about this particular reporter. I'm not making a grand statement about HIPAA.
(I don't know anything about the reporter other than that they worked for ABC7 in SFBA and not like GatewayPundit).
It would depend on exactly how the records were obtained. If hypothetically she paid a nurse $100 for it (and had done so many times in the past), that could be criminally liable. In practice, no-one would prosecute over a single x-ray. But when a reporter gets legally protected medical information "somehow", an insinuation that a legal violation took place at some point to effect that is not unreasonable.
It's strange to find myself so clearly on the side of tctapek here but yes it is super unreasonable for a district attorneys office to accuse reporters of things without a solid set of facts supporting it. There should be absolutely no abuse of the power of the office and of every official, the lawyers should be most likely to get this right.
A functioning justice system MATTERS and being trustworthy is one of the core requirements for a functioning justice system.
I somewhat agree that the whole document is sloppy, but I also think this conversation overemphasizes what is wrong with it. It is not as if the document simply accuses the journalist and leaves it there; it actually elaborates on what it means by “violated HIPAA” in that context (and please don’t make me start comparing it with current administration behavior).
There is also a broader question of how to properly handle what are, quite honestly, likely bad-faith actors — the journalist in this case. Should the office simply ignore the smearing campaign and the lies? Maybe. But this is already an issue even before accounting for the significant amount of money — pushed by a very small number of people — being spent against the attorney’s office.
OP didn't say the office should ignore lies or libel. OP said the attorney general should be very sure before making severe accusations against the press.
I think both are right - shouldn't ignore crime and should be responsible in addressing it.
Based on how same models rank fluctuates week to week, all I can conclude is that no frontier models is statistically better than the other or it's too task dependent that the result cannot converge.
ICE itself as a federal agency has sovereign immunity but the individuals who make up ICE only have qualified immunity for constitutional rights violations. However they do have sovereign immunity for general torts (or more technically for general torts the USG is substituted as the defendant and the USG has sovereign immunity.
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