If I “discovered” these records, would you assume I had a right to make a copy and view them? See the next article before you answer...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070724104229501

Patient Information Exposed In Hospital Security Lapse

Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 10:42 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Editor's note: As expected, Verus was involved in yet another hospital-related incident....

A security lapse at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis compromised the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of about 51,000 patients. St. Vincent notified patients by mail last week that personal information had been exposed, 6News' Cheryl Jackson reported.

.... St. Vincent officials said the problem happened when they subcontracted Verus Inc. to set up a program that would allow patients to pay bills online. "The Verus technician made a change to the Internet server, which left some of our patient information online, unprotected," said Johnny Smith, a spokesman for St. Vincent.

Hospital officials said the information was left unprotected for a "brief time," but said it is possible that no one accessed it. [Translation: We don't keep the logs that are designed to record who accessed the data. Bob]

"We have no way of knowing if the information was compromised, accessed or retrieved in any way," Smith said.

Source - The Indy Channel

Think of this ruling in light of hackers taking unprotected data. Are they now protected? Are the lawyers okay because “their cause was just?” Are non-lawyers second class citizens?

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1185181604443

Federal Judge Clears Law Firm Accused of Hacking Opponents' Web Archives

Michael Booth New Jersey Law Journal July 24, 2007

A law firm did not violate copyright and computer anti-hacking laws when it used a Web archive search tool to recover old Web pages of its client's adversary, says a federal judge.

Although the archived pages were supposed to be shielded from public view, the protections failed and lawyers at Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey in Valley Forge, Pa., did not hack their way in, Eastern District of Pennsylvania Judge Robert Kelly Jr. ruled last week on summary judgment.

"They did not 'pick the lock' and avoid or bypass the protective measure, because there was no lock to pick," Kelly wrote in Healthcare Advocates Inc. v. Harding Earley Follmer & Frailey, No. 05-3524. "Nor did the Harding firm steal passwords to get around a protective barrier. ... The Harding firm could not 'avoid' or 'bypass' a digital wall that was not there."

The ruling, if it stands, wards off a potential judgment of $3 million in damages a patients' advocacy company sought from the firm.

... In his July 20 ruling, Kelly found the firm was viewing Web pages that were publicly accessible -- even if mistakenly so -- and that there were no copyright violations because there was no public dissemination of the pages copied. The pages were made available only to other lawyers at the firm, which is akin to one person making copyrighted material available to family members.

Kelly also found the firm was putting the searched documents to fair use. "The Harding firm's purpose in viewing and printing copies of the archived images of Healthcare Advocates' website was primarily to defend their clients. The Harding firm viewed these archived web pages to assess the merit of the claims brought against their client. They hoped they might discover facts allowing them to refute the allegations."

Kelly continued: "It would be an absurd result if an attorney defending a client against charges of trademark and copyright infringement was not allowed to view and copy publicly available material, especially material that his client was alleged to have infringed."

... Healthcare Advocates' lawyer, Scott Christie, says he is disappointed by the outcome but "pleased that, as a matter of first impression, a robot.txt file qualifies as a security measure that controls access." Christie, of Newark, N.J.'s McCarter & English, adds that he believes his client will prevail in an appeal to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Same problem as above...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070724104229501

Patient Information Exposed In Hospital Security Lapse

Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 10:42 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

Editor's note: As expected, Verus was involved in yet another hospital-related incident....

A security lapse at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis compromised the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of about 51,000 patients. St. Vincent notified patients by mail last week that personal information had been exposed, 6News' Cheryl Jackson reported.

.... St. Vincent officials said the problem happened when they subcontracted Verus Inc. to set up a program that would allow patients to pay bills online. "The Verus technician made a change to the Internet server, which left some of our patient information online, unprotected," said Johnny Smith, a spokesman for St. Vincent.

Hospital officials said the information was left unprotected for a "brief time," but said it is possible that no one accessed it.

"We have no way of knowing if the information was compromised, accessed or retrieved in any way," [Translation: We turned off the logging feature Bob Smith said.

Source - The Indy Channel

New law?

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070724113513394

Password protected website did not create a reasonable expectation of privacy (updated)

Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 11:35 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: In the Courts

Police received information from one of defendant's neighbors that defendant and his live-in girlfriend had posted pictures form a cellphone on a Sprint PCS website. "The caller provided the address of D'Andrea's apartment (90 Veteran's Way in Gloucester, Massachusetts), the log-in name and password for the website, and the number of a cellular telephone used by defendants." The police went to the website and downloaded the pictures. A search warrant was obtained for defendant's premises. First, "[t]he warrant permitted the seizure of 'cameras' and 'computer storage devices.' The modern cellular telephone fits easily into these categories. It can also be a 'computer accessory,' as the warrant also specified.[n.4]" Second, the password protection on a website did not provide a reasonable expectation of privacy, rejecting LaFave's view. United States v. D'Andrea, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 52558 (D. Mass. July 20, 2007):

Source - FourthAmendment.com

See also: Orin Kerr, The Volokh Conspiracy

Another incident grows beyond the initial report...

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070724203418669

Disney data thief hit Johnson & Johnson, too

Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 08:34 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

A document on file with the state of New Hampshire indicates that the employee of a Disney contractor caught in a federal sting selling the credit-card information of Disney Movie Club members also victimized customers of Johnson & Johnson.

How many others he targeted is anybody's guess ... and the fact we have to guess should be considered everybody's problem.

First to draw attention to the Johnson & Johnson involvement was a staffer from the security Web site attrition.org who writes under the name "d2d."

Source - Networkworld

(Props, Attrition.org)

Your tax dollars at play. (Perhaps they left the doors “unprotected?”)

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070724184420123

Auditors Can't Find VA Computer Gear

Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 06:44 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches

More than a quarter of the computer equipment at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington could not be found by investigators, government auditors reported Tuesday.

Three other VA facilities showed slightly better results but still could not locate between 6 percent and 11 percent of their equipment, including computers, hard drives, monitors and other devices. In all, the four facilities audited by the Government Accountability Office reported more than 2,400 missing items originally worth $6.4 million.

Source - Associated Press

No comment

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=2007072419042758

Judge rules against government in warrantless surveillance cases (updated)

Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 07:04 PM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: In the Courts

A federal judge in California ruled Tuesday against the federal government's attempts to stop investigations in five states, including Connecticut, of President Bush's domestic spying program.Mo

Source - Associated Press

Related - Court Order

Once they can prove you don't have the right DNA, they ship you to the camps for the “Final Solution.”

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20070724070325520

AU: DNA discrimination at work

Tuesday, July 24 2007 @ 07:03 AM CDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Workplace Privacy

... It might sound far fetched but in some parts of the world people have been refused jobs on the basis of genetic tests which have shown they could develop certain diseases in the future.

In 2004 a woman in Germany was refused a teaching job on the basis of a medical examination that found she had a family history of the degenerative Huntington’s Disease. She successfully contested the decision in the Administrative Court.

In the US a railway company was found to have secretly tested employees for carpal tunnel syndrome. The tests were ruled unlawful and unnecessary by the US Federal Court under the Disability Act.

In Hong Kong three men were awarded damages in the District Court after being refused employment with the government because of a family history of schizophrenia.

Source - news.com.au

What do you bet that by Monday, Al Gore will have invented this?

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL1847347220070719?pageNumber=3&sp=true

From Wales, a box to make biofuel from car fumes

Thu Jul 19, 2007 10:01AM EDT By Michael Szabo

QUEENSFERRY (Reuters) - The world's richest corporations and finest minds spend billions trying to solve the problem of carbon emissions, but three fishing buddies in North Wales believe they have cracked it.

They have developed a box which they say can be fixed underneath a car in place of the exhaust to trap the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming -- including carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide -- and emit mostly water vapor.

The captured gases can be processed to create a biofuel using genetically modified algae.

If I understand this, we could have a University gather information about who owns what (let's say rare coins) they we could hire someone to steal them – right?

http://www.researchbuzz.org/wp/2007/07/24/collections-finder-west-florida-information/

Collections Finder: West Florida Information

Filed under: US-Florida

The University of West Florida has launched a portal for finding pointers to holdings on West Florida history. The collections contains information on more than 700 collections of family papers, business records, maps, photographs, and so on. It’s still under development but you can check it out at http://fusionmx.lib.uwf.edu/archon/ .