An article in the Times metro section reports on a patient who left Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn. From the article:
a person familiar with the situation said that SUNY Downstate officials wanted to remove him last week as part of the push to discharge or transfer the hospital's remaining patients. Administrators bought a one-way Greyhound bus ticket to Florida in Mr. Heredia's name, to depart the morning of July 19, according to the person, who is affiliated with the hospital through a nearby clinic and spoke anonymously because of patient privacy laws.
"Spoke anonymously because of patient privacy laws" suggests that the laws do not permit the person to disclose the information, a point reinforced later in the article by a quote from a SUNY Downstate spokesman, Robert Bellafiore, who reportedly said, "Federal laws are very serious about preserving patient privacy, and so are we."
But the law applies regardless of whether the person disclosing the information is anonymous or not. What the Times is doing by granting anonymity is assisting a person to break a law.
Now, maybe the Times thinks the law is silly, in which case, it can launch an editorial campaign to repeal or amend it. But remember, this is the same newspaper that today has three stories — one on page one, and two on the business page front — about alleged lawbreaking by Steven Cohen's hedge fund. If lawbreaking is bad when hedge fund managers do it, isn't it also bad when hospital employees do it with the cooperation of the New York Times?
One might argue that the hedge fund managers, at least those who pleaded guilty, were breaking the law to make money, while the Times source affiliated with Long Island College Hospital is breaking the law out of some altruistic desire to inform the public or protect a vulnerable patient. Yet without the person's name, it's difficult to assess his or her motivations. It's possible that the hospital source, too, has a monetary incentive, to protect his or her own livelihood by advancing the "keep the hospital open" side of the legal and political battle over closing the hospital. Certainly the Times has a monetary incentive — it's a for-profit company selling subscriptions to news articles prepared using the illegally disclosed information, just like Steven Cohen's hedge fund was taking fees from clients for managing money using illegally disclosed information. And while Arthur Sulzberger Jr. may not be as rich as Steven Cohen, he and his family have still done pretty well over the years, in part on the basis of publishing information divulged by sources violating either laws or contractual duties of secrecy to their governmental or nongovernmental employers.
Separately, the same Times article merits a "lost in Brooklyn" label. It says that Long Island College Hospital is "in Brooklyn Heights," when in fact the hospital is across Atlantic Avenue in the Cobble Hill neighborhood, as earlier Times coverage has reported accurately.