Can you think of a worse way to show
how much you care about your patients?
By Dissent,
May 4, 2012
Lance Williams reports on a case
previously covered
on this blog:
A Prime Healthcare
Services hospital in Redding broke state law when it
publicized a patient’s confidential medical files in an effort to
discredit a California Watch news report, state regulators
say.
The state
Department of Public Health on Tuesday issued five “deficiencies”
against Shasta Regional Medical Center for what were described as
repeated breaches of patient confidentiality last year.
At one point, the
hospital CEO sent an e-mail to 785 people – virtually everyone who
worked at the hospital – disclosing details from a 64-year-old
diabetes patient’s confidential files, state investigators found.
Read more on California
Watch.
Back in January, I suggested that SRMC
should probably shut up and not continue to try to defend its
actions. The ruling by the state comes as no surprise to me. Nor,
however, am I surprised to read that SRMC is appealing the finding.
Do I expect to see fines over this one?
You betcha. A “good faith belief” only cuts you some slack, not
all.
Interesting set of facts. The
investigator stole the Logon ID of a third party to access the girls
“private” Facebook pictures. Isn't that third party the victim?
Outraged
Dad Says Law Firm and Insurer Snooped on Injured Girl’s Facebook
Page
May 4, 2012 by Dissent
Kevin Koeninger reports:
A father claims in
court that a law firm and an insurer hired an
investigator to pose as the Facebook friend of his
12-year-old daughter, who had been hurt in a dog attack, “for the
purpose of examining and printing all of the postings and pictures
contained” on her Facebook profile.
Nelson Cope sued
two people and three businesses on behalf of his daughter, in the
Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas.
Read more on Courthouse
News.
Okay, you’re probably thinking that
Dad needs to wake up to the reality that whatever you post on
Facebook is fair game, right? But what if the investigator acquired
the friend’s Facebook login and used that to access to the
daughter’s page? What then? It would seem to be a Facebook TOS
violation, but are there grounds for any civil claim against the
investigator and his clients?
This type of change would make their
job easier. No need for warrants or other pesky (hated) paperwork.
And, my Ethical Hackers get to use the backdoor for their own (purely
academic) purposes! (Remember, I get 1%)
FBI
Wants Backdoors in Facebook, Skype and Instant Messaging
The FBI has been lobbying top internet
companies like Yahoo and Google to support a proposal that would
force them to provide backdoors for government surveillance,
according to CNET.
The Bureau has been quietly
meeting with representatives of these companies, as well as
Microsoft (which owns Hotmail and Skype), Facebook and others to
argue for a legislative proposal, drafted by the FBI, that would
require social-networking sites and VoIP, instant messaging and
e-mail providers to alter their code to make their products
wiretap-friendly.
… Under the Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, passed in 1994,
telecommunications providers are required to make their systems
wiretap-friendly. The Federal Communications Commission extended
CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and
colleges, but web companies are not covered by the law.
… The news comes on the heels of
another FBI plan that began kicking around in 2010 that would require
backdoors in encrypted communication systems. That proposal,
which would revisit the encryption wars of the 1990s, has failed to
gather administration backing.
(Related)
DOJ
Official: Any Privacy Protection is Too Much Privacy Protection for
Cell Phone Tracking
May 4, 2012 by Dissent
Hanni Fahoury writes:
Jason Weinstein, a
deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s
criminal division, told a panel at the Congressional Internet Caucus
Advisory Committee’s “State of the Mobile Net” conference
yesterday that requiring a search warrant to obtain
location tracking information from cell phones would “cripple”
prosecutors and law enforcement officials. [That's why we could
never solve a crime until cellphones were invented. Bob]
We couldn’t disagree more.
[...]
The problem with
the DOJ’s position is that it fails to take into account privacy.
The only way to ensure “fairness” and “justice,” is to demand
that our Fourth Amendment rights not be violated by law enforcement
working closely with cell phone providers to access your location
information without your knowledge. We’ve already seen that
despite the ruling in Jones, law enforcement and the wireless
industry are finding ways to continue their pre-Jones practices of
warrantless surveillance amid a stunning lack of transparency. We’re
slowly seeing legislative action in the right direction on these
important issues. On the federal level, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Or) has
proposed the GPS Act, that would require law enforcement to obtain a
search warrant to access location information. In California, we
sponsored a bill with the ACLU of Northern California, to require law
enforcement to get a search warrant anytime it wants location
information about another person in California. And earlier this
week, Representative Ed Markey (D-Mass) sent a request (PDF) to the
biggest wireless carriers, demanding information about their
relationship with law enforcement.
Read more on EFF.
(Related)
May 03, 2012
FAS:
Counterintelligence Surveillance Under FISA Grew in 2011
Secrecy
News, Steven Aftergood: "In 2011, the US Government
submitted 1,745 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court for authorization to conduct electronic surveillance or
physical searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA),
according to a new
annual report to Congress. Of these, 1,676 included requests for
authority for perform electronic surveillance, the report said. That
compares to 1,579 such applications in 2010 (including 1,511 for
electronic surveillance). As is usually the case,
the FIS Court did not deny any electronic surveillance applications
in whole or in part last year, though it made
modifications to 30 of them. The new report
says that the government filed 205 applications for business records
(including “tangible things”) for foreign intelligence purposes
last year, compared to 96 in the previous year."
There are some very interesting
conclusions in this article. Not sure I believe all of them, but
definitely worth thinking about.
The
Newsonomics of Pricing 101
When the price of your digital product
is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing.
Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing.
Who is promising to keep student load
rates low?
May 04, 2012
TRAC:
Recent Rise in Federal Suits to Recover Student Loans
"The latest month-by-month data
from the federal courts shows that in March of this year the
government reported that it had sued 279 individuals in order to seek
recovery of defaulted student loans. According to the timely
case-by-case case civil enforcement information analyzed by the
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), this count was
25.7% higher than the previous month when
222 cases of this kind were filed. Relative to its population, the
Eastern District of Michigan (Detroit) led the nation with
prosecution rates ten times the average for the country. The Central
District of California (Los Angeles) led the nation in the number of
suits filed, accounting for 140 out of the 279 suits in March."
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