Loss of Privacy

The University of Miami’s Medical has had their backup tapes stolen, which held more than 2 million medical records.

Jacqueline Menendez, vice president of communications at the university, said a vehicle used by Archive America Ltd. to transport the patient data was broken into in downtown Coral Gables, Fla., on March 17. Thieves removed a transport case carrying the school’s computer backup tapes, she said.

For reasons Menendez could not explain, Archive America waited 48 hours before finally notifying the university on Mar. 19 about the break-in and theft.

The university posted an alert about the incident on April 17, a full month after the backup tapes were stolen. In a statement, Doctor Pascal J. Goldschmidt, senior vice president for medical affairs and dean of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said, “Even though I am confident that our patients’ data is safe, we felt that in the best interest of the physician-patient relationship we should be transparent in this matter.”

Here we go again.  Why does it take a month or more to release alerts and inform people about what has just happened?  How freaking incompetent are people that they just can’t seem to get their shit together when dealing with sensitive information?

The stolen backup tapes hold names, addresses, Social Security numbers and health information all patients at university medical facilities since Jan. 1, 1999. Financial data from approximately 47,000 people may be on the missing tapes, said Mendendez. Each potential victim has been contacted by the school, she said.

Just great.  They don’t even know everything that might have been on the tapes but they ship them off to someplace else with improper security and we’re supposed to trust people like this?

“The university feels confident that the person who took [the tapes] doesn’t know what they have. Even if they do know what’s contained inside, it’s very difficult to extract that information,” remarked Menendez.

Well, you just let them know how important these stolen tapes are.  Now, they will spend lots of time trying to extract the information.  It won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible either.  This could have severe consequences for the people who have information stored on the tapes further down the road but, because your experts couldn’t get into it in a few days, you think it’s secure.

As many have stated numerous times before, identity cards are useless in the prevention of terrorism.  They are, and always will be, a means to control the population forced to carry them.  A leaked report from the EU has just admitted as much.

The EU report, obtained by The Mail on Sunday, says most people behind terror attacks in the UK and Europe were living in the EU legally and so would not be affected by increased security measures.

The British National Identity Register is, most likely, illegal under some EU countries’ laws, such as Germany or Sweden.  Given the fact that the database is suspect and that the ID cards do nothing to prevent terrorism as proposed, what is the point of having them other than to spy upon its own citizens?

Normally, I hate GPS, RFID, and anything else that can be used to track people.  However, I couldn’t help but become giddy from this ingenious use of GPS.

A deer named Thor had been roaming through his life, unaware that Google Earth was tracking him.

Someone named ‘Siberian’ at the Google Earth Community posted how he managed to make this happen. Turns out he had collared a deer they named “Thor” with a GPS and cellphone with SMS capability. They are studying deers living in suburban areas in Pennsylvania. Siberian then hacked up a way to use the resulting E-mail to create a spreadsheet which is then converted into a file you can use to track the deer in Google Earth.

In the past few weeks we’ve heard of yet more patient data being stolen, but don’t worry.  The government says we don’t have to worry about identity theft, even though social security numbers were in the database, so we’re all good.

A government laptop computer containing sensitive medical information on 2,500 patients enrolled in a National Institutes of Health study was stolen in February, potentially exposing seven years’ worth of clinical trial data, including names, medical diagnoses and details of the patients’ heart scans. The information was not encrypted, in violation of the government’s data-security policy.

No one was notified until a month later, which is par for the course for these agencies.  Rep. Joe Barton, however has asked for an inquiry in matter.

I really think we’ve had enough of these breaches and laptops should never be allowed to leave the buildings they are in.

For years, now, Pentagon-backed researchers have been trying to create cyborg insects that could serve as living, remote-controlled spies.  The problem is, those modified bugs never survived long enough to be useful.  Now, Georgia Tech professor Robert Michelson says he’s managed to get the bug ‘borgs to live into adulthood.