Assuming, for openers, that you have your cell phone with you, and that it keeps track of and causes wherever you have been to be stored, somebody besides Al Franken and his liberal colleague should be concerned about the potential for invasions of reasonable and legitimate expectations of privacy 'which 'society' is prepared to recognize," in the troublingly anomalous language of the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment case law. "Society" does not exist, and certainly has never been nad is not prepared to recognize and protect privacy or other individual rights unless clearly required by the Constitution or other applicable law. The Court, under both "liberal" and "conservative" control, has too often used "useful in fighting [pick one] "the [phony sham and scam that used to be called] the War on Drugs," or "terrorism," etc., ad infinitum, as justifications for invasions of privacy. The same argument could be made for mandatory brain chips or the rack and thumbscrews. Where you are is rarely a private matter regardless of what you are doing. If you are operating a car on a public street, that is not private and you have no right to expect privacy, or an absence of red light cameras, etc. If you go to a grocery or gun store, Carnegie Hall, or a porno movie house, you have to know there will be Other People and assume that one or more of them will be happy to photograph you with their cell phone and post it, or just tell someone else, including tghe cops, where you were. I'm a retired lawyer and the foolishness of crooks, from the low level idiots to top lawyers and bankers who should know better, never ceased to amaze me. I was robbed in broad daylight in front of several witnesses including a reserve cop and his wife. An experienced lawyer from a big firm drew hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the bank, when he knew or should know that they were required to report that, washed it in a washing machine to remove fingerprints, and gave it to an accomplice who deposited it in his bank, again triggering reporting, and it still took seventeen years before they got caught. One of my genius clients committed a kidnapping with intent to comit rape withn brick-throwingdistance and line of sight from the lighted front door of a police station after having identified himself acrtoss the street. The fun case for me was the client arrested running from the scene of an aggravated robbery and attempted murder because the real criminal threatened and shot at him. Of course the police got the victim to identify my client's picture and coerced him into signing a confession, after the real criminal had confessed, so goess who they prosecuted? We won. I'm fascinated by what this technology would have done to another case where the alleged victim had positively identified the arrested suspect but the jury caught on when he produced his prison record photo showing a tattoo he still had but which the alleged victim had sworn he did not have. I still don't think that robbery ever happened. After the data has been stored for some time, you might be more likely to find yourself needing an alibi than worried aboiut having to explain why you were at the location of a crime, the police station the address of which the police at the county seat here swore twice was "a high crime area," etc. Of course you might have any number of legitimate reasons for being at a crime scene or other suspicious location. It probably doesn't cost much to store collected data indefinitely, but it would be my guess that its potential value for any legitimate or illegitimate purpose would diminish rapidly over time. I'm much more concerned about tracking in cyberspace than the real world. My Web searches and Email are more likely to reveal things that are legally privileged and confidential, or which I am generally more concerned about keeping private. Normally, nobody cares enough about where you go or what you do to justify the cost of tracking you, but as the cost drops and the process gets easier that primary protection begins to evaporate. My law practice very unexpectedly came to include representing an awful lot of survivors of childhood incest, etc. Do you think either the authorities, or the private crooks, including those who burglarized and burned my law office, do things like that, or seek cell hone data, without already having got the information or some of it clearly illegally?

Statistics are practically useless when, as on this issue, what you are trying to do is predict the net effect of divese influences, such as violent video games," not on a cage full of mice but on one unique individual child. On top of that fact and problem, the odds of anyone working on this actually having enough accurate information about the many and complex influences upon a given child, much less a thousand children in a study, to be able to say with any real confidence, or any statistical level of confidence, would be nil. Of course, when you move from your theoretical sample to the real world, you enter a loop in which the kids who are allowed to and do play these violent video games, or do so for the lengths of time we're talking about here, and probably the ones with lousy parents who are more likely to be violent anyway. Anybody who doesn't have a financial stake in these games and who ever sees kids who do and do not play them, or spend huge amounts of time playing them, knows perfectly well that games, and other media, are very carefully crafted to impact kids, bypass certain higher centers of thought, and influence them. When I was practicing juvenile law, the kids who were allowed ot and did listen to Marilyn Manson, Death Metal, etc.play such games extensively, or both, wee the ones who got into serious and repeated violent and other legal trouble.

Right. The students who have been given any parenting, and anything resembling education and guidance at school, atre already taking Algebra II. Actually, while taking and succeeding at Algebra II may be a good predictor of success in high school, college, work, and life, the one and only variable that really, consistently, affects and contributes materially to, as well as predicting, such outcomes and each of them, is parental interest and involvement. Try correlating the kids who take and succeed at Algebra II with active parental interest and involvement sometime. I took, and passed, four years of math in high school, which, back then, pre-Sputnik, did not include Analytic Geometry, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus, or any computer courses. I loved it, despite knowing that I wasn't the best math student and had some trouble with it. My 99 3/4th percentile verbal scores got me offers from several good engineering schools, MIT, m first choicek bieng the only one smart enough to turn me down with a 70th percentile math score, What nobody told me, until I hit college and, having repeatedly tested out of freshman college math, took Analytic Geometry and Calculus, was that, as the grader put it when he sent me a note to "See the professor immediately!" was that I had been and was "doing all the problems a-- backwards." One morning, the professor opened with "With a fifth-order determinant, we can demonstrate . . . " and I raised my hand and asked him what that was, he said two words, the first of which was "Oh." I knocked a letter grade off my undergraduate average, and nearly killed myself, trying, repeatedly, to pass those courses. I did manage a B in Statistics. We didn't learn until many years later, after I had switched majors and practiced law for years, that I had been born without a piece of brain structure crucial to higher math. We had always attributed any problems to a known uncorrectable congenital neurological vision problem which had got me refused admission to the Washington, D. C. school system. The school systems in this state university town and the county seat turn out winners in robotics competition, etc., sponsored by a business enterprise, and have some good teachers, and students, but way too many of their students, including some I hired and some we couldn't use, couldn't alphabetize, spell "secretary" or "Algebra," compose a proper simple business letter in WordPerfect or Word, or otherwise, or balance a checkbook, etc. The salutatorian, second in her class, at another nearby school district got a scholarship to the state university here and had to be put into both remedial reading and remedial math. I have friends on the verge of completing doctorate degrees in math and sciences who can't find jobs at living pay in their fileds and have ended up roofing, driving a truck, and two are teaching English in China. People who wee making six-figure incomes in computer science are working temporary gigs at anything they can get, about $10 per hour, and have lost their homes. The number and percentage of boys going on to college has dropped like a rock. Half the people I know are working well below their eduction, skill, and experience level, and practically everybody I know working a legitimate job or jobs is making less than htey used to. The official figures for unemployment, under-employment, inflation, etc. are sick jokes.

Some of you understand the software engineering of this a lot better than I do. Can, or how can, we prevent and deal with these crimes on the technical side? I'm a retired lawyer with medical and other privacy law expertise and this is just one of many areas where our legal system doesn't work except for the vrey rich criminals. If there is any advice you technical experts can give Congress while they are working on yet another computer privacy bill right now, please do so and please publish your advice, both in code etc. and in language Members of Congress, and those of us whose doctorates are not in math or computers can understand. These recurring breaches, ranging from hacking into supposedly protected stolen laptops to things like this, would probably not happen, or be as common, if we could and did dry up the money in and market for stolen personal data. I suspect nobody in government or either political party wants to really stop this. The companies that gather and sell personally identifiable information know that a lot of what they are buying from such thieves is not only stolen but is, or should be, protected by law. Most of us have to use Loyalty Cards, etc., which "give" us "savings" that come out of the stores having systematically overcharged us in the first place. Likewise coupons. On top of that, the best published data indicates that these stores charge more than others even after these "discounts." The stores know how much of each brand of what they sell, and their keeping records that identify individual customers for prescription medications, etc. and using, sharing, o selling this should be outlawed. Anyone with the buying records of customers of Kroger's pharmacies, college scholarship applicants, and others whose rights to privacy were apparently violated here, has power that nobody should be allowed to have. Of course it will be misused, either by the original holders or those who actually or allegedly stole it--or did they really buy it?--from them. Nobody ever gets busted when the academic and medical records of a generation of university students and faculty are, for some inexplicable reason, on a laptop computer that then somehow gets left behind somewhere and actually or allegedly stolen. If you gather up a large quantity of sewage, toxic chemical waste, plague virus, or the like, you are responsible for keeping it confined. Nobody is really held accountable for what happens to this stolen private personal data because the buyers are rich and rich people are extremely unlikely to get investigated and prosecuted, not to mention that nobody outside their dirty little market in personal data knows who has what, much less what is and isn't accurate, stolen, or being used for illegal purposes. Of course, if you steal a confidential file that incriminates the right police officers and politicians you're home free. I was a lawyer handling criminal defense, and representing a lot of incest survivors, when the geniuses at the local police department sold me the departments recently replaced, and un-erased much less formatted, hard drive.

California Healthcare Provider Wants Illness-Predicting Algorithm Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 30, @07:04AM from the make-hospitals-smaller dept. alphadogg writes "The Heritage Provider Network wants to do for healthcare what technology in the film Minority Report did for police work. In other words, it wants to use technology to pre-emptively predict when illness is likely to strike and take measures to prevent costly hospitalizations. This week Heritage announced that it was offering a prize of $3 million for any developer who successfully created a 'breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.'" Oh. Lord! An insurance company using “available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” much less an algorithm based thereupon, “to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” would produce a whole stack of disasters for patients, the healthcare system, and its own ‘bottom line.” “Minority Report,” to which the contributor compared this, was a sci-fi horror show, so I hope he understood this fact, but many others may not. An insurer spending $3 million on this project at this point in the process of computerization of patient health records, federal subsidies for this and related processes, and medical knowledge, would guarantee the ultimate “garbage in, garbage out” results. If anyone ever invents an algorithm that would have “predict[ed] and prevent[ed]” most of my hospitalizations, or most of those of others that I know about, he could undoubtedly invent another one that would “predict and prevent” death, injury, losses in the stock market or casino, divorce, and inclement weather. I’m not sure what kind of medical records this insurance or healthcare company may have, or think it has, on its customers or patients, or how far ahead of the rest of the country California health records just might be, but I’ve been dealing with, trying to get, and trying to unscrew my own and my clients’ healthcare records for many years, and most of them are somewhere between useless and downright dangerous even without having been run through some new algorithm, which woujld present whole new universes of possible errors. I live in an exurban county with one [public] general and one private mental hosipital, one other dominant lab for diagnostic scan, and assorted other procedures, and lots of doctors’ offices and practices, several of which have osme of this same kind of equipment. The hospital, the primary private imaging company, used by many doctors, and the various doctors’ offices can’t read each other’s MRI, CT, and other results. I fell and broke my wrist, was taken to two successive emergency rooms and then to a third hospital in another county becxuse nobody here and available did hands and wrists, and we ended up with at least six (6) different sets of results produced at different entities in four counties. It was not until some time after my surgery that my hand surgeon sent me to another facility, that can take X-ray and MRI pictures showing vital information that the others could and did not, that we discovered a major part of the problem. Except for the X-rays on film, nobody has equipment that can read all of these. The local hospital’s off-site records contractor charged me several dollars a page for what were supposed to be records of several stays for different things, not one of which could have been, much less was, predicted or diagnosed hours, much less days or months, in advance. The hospitals have no copies of these that I can get. Every page of these records, from several stays in two of the hospital’s facilities in different towns, was totally blacked out except for a white dot in the center. When I lived in Dallas earlier, someone with an X-ray lab and I discovered that they had somehow managed to consolidate the records of several people, representing two sexes, two races, sixty or more years’ differences in ages, over a foot variations in heights, some with and some without bullets, seen over many years by different doctors and hospitals, into my medical file. I think the one with the bullet, which tipped off the technician, may have been my dad, over sixtyyears older and considerably taller, but don’thave a clue who the others were, most of whose files, like other medical andmedical billing records I have seen, were identified only by last name and initials—and there are two spellings used even in my dad’s family and generation. I had to have one set of X-rays of something else done over because the doctor who ordered them and hired the mobile contractor who took them closed her office without notice and apparently threw all patient records in the dumpster. Two hospitals where I had longer stays likewise closed down and dumped their records, and my doctors don’t have and can’t get copies. One set of records of a very extensive and expensive set of work-ups the doctors on staff at one of them had done on me were contracted from outside providers and we don’t even have their names and addresses, but my inquiries indicate that only the hospital that ordered them everhad full copies. One key set covering several years was at the University of Texas Medical School at Galveston, and all their records were washed away in a hurricane and flood. We discovered in law school in 1961 that my entry physical in Dallas indicated that I had, and told the doctor that I had, a heart attack, the doctor had died, and nobody else can correct that record. We think that’s the medical record that led to my being fired from one job but we couldn’t get the evidence. Assembling the records I am expected to produce in an upcoming proceeding, if it could be done which it can’t at any cost, would involve 72 years of medical records, produced by doctors most of whom are dead, in several facilities in several states covering much of the United States. One facility where I was actually or allegedly seen, dfiagnosed, and treated over a period of several years delayed for months and then sent me about twenty pounds of records, from which practically every substantive page had been removed leaving little but useless transmittal sheets. The 958 pages I received from two stays at another hospital, getting which took years and a real hassle, includes records of statements I never made, which the evidence from both sides of a lawsuit clearly shows I never would have made, to doctors and others I never met, while omitting the original record of the one doctor I did see and talk to, who I had known for years. There are lots of pages of illegible notes relating to treatment that never happened. The privacy implications of the medical records project are alarming, to say the least. I have read on credible computer sites that legl counsel for the big companies working on, and receiving substantial governmentmoney for, that, they insist that HIPAA and other applicable gfederasl and state medical privacy laws don’t apply to them. I can’t legally find out whether or not my wife has picked up her prescription, and creditors insist they can’t tell me how much to pay on her credit account even with the account number and other identifying data, but MSN publishes advice to employers to get complete health records before hiring or keeping any employee and several sites offer such supposedly privileged information along with unlisted phone numbers, Email, etc.

I know experts, credible in other things I know more about, who say that they have helped persons wo self-identified as "gay but wanted to become "straight" to do so, and others who insist that this is impossible. This isn't my area of expertise, but evidence, including scientific evidence, and the First Amendment and freedom and competition in ideas are among those in which I do have expertise. I've read a number of things by experts on both sides of this issue, and, frankly, come away with the impression that both sides' cases leave much to be desired. I have talked to people who tell me they have chosen to anfd successfully changed, and others who say it can't be done but none of those who have talked to me, in or out of privileged and confidential relationships, tell me they really tried. Apps are a form of expression, and I think Apple, etc., set a dangerous precedent when they allow organized pressure groups' petition campaigns, threats, etc., to persuade them to suppress expression on controversial issues, regardless of which side has the current temporary majority on them. What's next, caving to pressure by the same people to pull Biblical and religious apps because the Old and New Testaments both contain strong language about this issue? Sprint, my cell phone carrier to which I am indentured for years, is going to offer the Android HTC but not the iPhone4, and I'm having trouble getting detailed information about its capabilities and available apps relevant to my legal and other interests to help me decide whether to upgrade or not. Do we really want Apple, Microsoft, Google, GE, or the Democrats or Republicans, or some of their big money backers, or whoever, effectively censoring apps or Ebooks on the basis of the authors' opinions?

"Tort reform for the Rich. Crime and Punishment for the poor." Right. Look at the hedge fund manager in Palm Beach sort of prosecuted for systematic child sexual abuse, or any number of other such cases. Amen! IAAL (retired, long story), worked for both a plaintiff's and an insurance-defense firm before going solo years ago, and have seen far more abuse on the defense than the plaintiff's side. "Tort reform" is just a thumb or both feet on the side of the scale, usually defendants', that tends to favor the side that has the money and makes the big "campaign contributions" (payoffs). I'm a values and economic free enterprise conservative on most issues but this has gone way off track, among some other issues. Funny how certain politicians vilify "trial lawyers" until they need one, or appoint one who has represented MS and worked for them in the White House for the Supreme Court. Texas Lawyer notes that, this year, even some of the civil practice defense bar is saying some of the latest batch of sop-called "tort reform" bills in the legislature go too far.

FOIA requests for political purposes are as old as, and were clearly included within the scope of, freedom of information and open records laws, which wisely do not require that the requesting party give any reason for wanting the public governmental information requested. This is only a news story for the New York Times or other liberal organs if the request comes from the Republican Party as here or another organization not on their approved list of leftist Establishment groups. There are some loopholes you can drive a truck through. Doesn't it ever occur to politicians and those seeking to buy access to and influence with them, the only way I know to get either, to meet in the restroom and whisper or pass a note, or use a separate political Email account, address, and maybe a separate computer system so these don't get stored on the government server? Actually, I think if a politician sent or received an occasional Email from his wife or child, or other personal matters disclosure of which would be highly offensive to a reasonable person, or even about his and/or his mistress' of either sex's testing, that ought to be outside the scope of FOIA in most instances. Of course no politician of either party would bge stupid enough to Email anything illegal or embarrassing, get caught with a $5,000.00 an hour or $5.00 a pop hooker or a freeaer full of cash, etc. They never lie or take bribes, either. I'm in Texas. Under our state Open Records law, the Attorney General's office demanded payment, within ten days, of about half my monthly income just to answer a basic question, on a subject addressed on his campaign and official Web sites, about what position he had taken, on the record, on behalf of the State on the Constitutionality of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They insisted that the hundreds of thousands of disabled citizens were not "significant" for purposes of a provision permitting waiver of such prohibitive expenses. I once found a sworn lawsuit, in the open public court records, where the plaintiff sued the defendant for failing to pay him on a contract to "ascertain the confidential plans of the State Highway Department relating to acquisition of land for . . .." One of the Plaintiff's attorneys in that case was a state legislator and later on our State Supreme Court.

I’m a retired Texas lawyer. I have won a 5:7 jury deadlock in the first of 87 dope delivery cases to go to trial using an entrapment defense, resulting in all the offers including the one to my first offender, avidly recruited over time with a series of parties featuring steaks and beer, etc., coming down from 40-60 years to probation. Of course, the risky thing about an entrapment defense is that your client has to tell the jury “I did it” right up front but then demonstrate that he would not have engaged in the conduct but for the officials’ persuasive misconduct. Merely offering someone the opportunity to violate the law if he is so inclined is not entrapment, but there is one U. S. Supreme Court case in which the majority of Justices found and held that the government had been so persistent and persuasive in finally getting someone with no known history of interest or viewing to order child porn, by mail, that it crossed the line and created the crime. I, and some other lawyers in the same building, received one similar mailing, which may have been from the same government operation, years ago, but I sent it to the Postal Inspectors, and never received any more, nor did I hear any more about this until I read the Supreme Court opinion later. I have represented a few child molesters, after and as a direct result of having, very unexpectedly, found myself representing and in other privileged and confidential relationships with an awful lot of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, most of which is incest. Some of the abusers, unlike this defendant who looks like Central Casting’s or the average person’s picture of a perp, were socially, economically, and politically prominent and powerful (palmed off on us by both parties) so didn’t get busted. It is entirely legal and proper for the authorities to offer willing would-be criminals the opportunity to commit crimes and then catch and bust them, as long as the government and its agents do not affirmatively persuade them to commit or attempt to commit the crime. If you don’t see a cop so you speed, and get caught by a cop behind a billboard, that’s your problem because you should not have been speeding. If you try to buy child porn, which can’t be made without abusing a child, or to buy or otherwise solicit sex from someone you believe to be a child too young to consent, dope, an illegal firearm or one you are legally ineligible to possess, or hire a hit-man to kill someone, and get caught because you were really dealing with a cop, you are morally and legally guilty. Assuming that it would be reasonably foreseeable that anyone would be persuaded by “animated emoticons” to try to get something he didn’t want and intend to buy anyway, much less sex with a child which anyone knows is illegal, the short answer to this rather ludicrously desperate argument is that the defendant went looking for sex with a child on line, but for which search, and opening the link, he would never have come to the pitch much less these “animated emoticons.” Trying to have sex with an underage girl is crime one element of which, that the government must prove beyond reasonable doubt, is specific intent.

I have not read the Dutch statute in issue or the case brought under it, but, as a retired lawyer, my guess or guesses would be that the law under which they tried to bring this case was intended to deal with hacking into computers to steal data, which anyone knows or should know is wrong and illegal, and the people drafting and voting on it probably did not have WfFi, routers, hot spots, "war-driving," or anything like this in mind, so they didn't mention or deal with it. I suspect that the legislature will amend the law to include, or, better, pass a separate law dealing with. this subject. It occurs to me that casually accessing the Internet through an open WiFi connection should be treated a little differently as to penalties. Criminal laws have to be sufficiently specific to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what is and is not prohibited. This law may well have been written and passed before WiFi and this whole issue came to most legislators' attention.

Thanks. I shudder at scanning a computer textbook even with document feeder but you have given me some ideas.

A college teacher of computer science came to my law office, back in the good old days of DOS 5.0, so I asked him to take a look at our computer. When a C prompt came up, he said "I see you're using C language." I thought he was kidding or making fun of me. He may have been an expert at something but it did not include personal computers or how to set up and use them in a law office. I'm a lawyer, not a computer scientist or software engineer, and came to the computer revolution late in the 80s.

"people like us, who would know how to spot a botnet." I live across the street from a university with a computer science department, and know some of their professors, and a couple of computer geniuses in the defense contract industry, and I don't know anybody who could "spot a botnet" or tell me how to "spot a botnet," be sure my computer wasn't infected with one, or do anything about it if it were. I wish somebody would post how, or a link to how, to defend effectively against such things and, while you're at it, against having your Email and other data hacked.

Hush. You should be shut up. Do you think the First Amendment actually guarantees the right to tell the truth? You are ruining the movie by giving way the plot and ending. The Government, which is supposedly representative of us, engages regularly in a species of speech which the Supreme Cort itself calls "government speech," which is different from the speech of human being, and even corporate persons and, in part because of the doctrines of sovereign and official immunity, are subject to reviews and compensation for damages for falsehood by nobody. I've read one article in the New York Times, years ago during my law school days, about a large assembly and demonstration on my campus at Vanderbilt in Nashville that absolutely never happened. It would have been my job to cover it if it had, and it didn't. It would have been directly between my living quarters and my office on campus, and there was nobody there. I never could find even a leaflet or poster trying to organize it, in those pre-Internet days. When I had been state editor of another publication for students in undergraduate school, I was inundated with outrageously, and easily checked, defamatory information for publication, most of it generated by well-known left-leaning agencies of a church and several Establishment entities still regularly quoted in the liberal media to this day. I also got some propaganda that had been found libelous in courts long before. Pick any government or media source or sources you wish and tell me that any figure used by either party or candidate during the 2008 campaign, or the debate over the Obamacare bill, was either honest or reasonably reliable. I dare you. Every candidate nominated by either party since 2001 has told us that he, and only he, could and would catch Osama Bin Laden, too. Both parties, and the government under Presidents and Congresses of both parties, have been propagandizing us, which is supposed to be illegal, for years. A short-wave listener, I discovered during the Korean "police action (war) that U. S. sources would say the enemy lost a large specific number of planes and we didn't lose any, the Soviets would pretty much reverse these figures, and the BBC, Swiss, etc. would provide another set or sets of figures which I suspected then and now were closer ot the truth. Since the enemy knew how many planes they had lost, these figures had to be for home consumption. I am somewhat curious how our government, or the parties in control of the White House and Senate, and of the House, respectively, could have been so stupid as to permit the leaking and publication of a "defense" contract regarding deceptive propaganda, which should have been highly classified. Now if our intelligence in, or the responsible people's knowledge of the geography and history of, the Middle East and Muslim Crescent, except what we get from the Israelis, was any good, we would, or at least might, have avoided a lot of strategic and tactical blunders in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. You can have all the electronic bells and whistles you want,m but without very good intelligence, designing propaganda based upon a thorough knowledge of the target audience, you're going to blow it. Anybody who doesn't believe that, once perfected at government, i.e., our, expense, this technology would not be deployed in politics here at home, is dreadfully naive.

I post only very, very little of what I post on the Net on Facebook, but the interesting computer angle here sweems to me, to be how any normal teenager's Facebook page would have come to the attention of more than 2o00,000 people? I could get rich if I could attract that many to a Web site. 70,000 for theWhat kind of settings did she use? Nobody has that many even FB friends new party? How many of these were real and how many virtual fakes? Nobody has that many even FB "friends."