Samizdata

Here’s a Washington Post story which shows that merely passing a law which makes privacy compulsory is not the whole answer to the problem of maintaining privacy:

The transplant patient was recovering well when doctors discovered that his new heart might have been infected with bacteria before the operation. When the doctors sought more information so they could give the man the right antibiotics, the hospital where the donor had died refused, citing new federal patient privacy rules.

“It was ridiculous. The only live part of the donor was in our patient,” said Deeb Salem, chief medical officer at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.

As it turned out, Salem’s patient was in no danger from the infection. But because the donor’s hospital refused to release any information, doctors were forced, as a precaution, to put the man on multiple antibiotics, potentially exposing him to dangerous side effects.

“It cost our patient the risk of being on multiple antibiotics for 12 to 15 hours, not to mention a lot of money,” Salem said.

Thanks to privacy.org for the link.

Most of us are fortunate enough to live our lives in peaceful obscurity. Not many of us do things that attract attention from more then our circle of friends and family.

There are those though that either through their skill or through opportunity attract unwanted attention. While Brian writes about the attention that Prince William is getting, in Australia, we who make princes of our sportsmen are debating the latest scandal involving cricketer Shane Warne.

Warne is one of the most gifted bowlers in the history of the game, but away from the field he is a rather unsavoury man who has gathered a well earned sleazy reputation.

An enterprising South African woman has tried to cash in on that reputation by making allegations against Warne. It seems that for once there is little truth to the story, and indeed she’s been charged by the South African police with extortion. Whatever the truth of this sordid affair, the media spotlight is once again firmly on Shane Warne. Sometimes that spotlight steps over the boundary of what is acceptable by the media after News Corporation’s flagship newspaper “The Australian” took a photograph of Warne having a smoke in his backyard.

While in general little sympathy need be wasted on Warne, in this case, I feel for him. His response to the affair has been to keep as low a profile as possible, and every person has the right not to be photographed if they don’t want to be.

Governments are notoriously inquisitive about the private matters of their citizens, but they are not the only intrusive Big Brother out there.

In the factory where I work we have been given magnetic swipecards to enter and exit the factory through the new security gates. The main point of these security gates is to protect the car park, which was targeted by a gang of thieves late last year. They do a good job- it’s going to take a fair effort to get in the carpark now. The carpark is also monitered by a security camera.

Some of the lads have made joking remarks to the effect that we are now ‘inside’; as if it was a prison environment, but no one really objects, as we all want our cars to be there and in one piece when we finish our shifts.

Some other employers though use far more extensive surveillance in their working areas. I used to work in an internet datacentre, and the company that operated it had security cameras operating over every part of the centre where our customers might go. These cameras recorded everything on magnetic tape. Part of my job in the Network Operations Center was to monitor these cameras for anything that might be a security breach.

There was one camera that covered the front door to our building which faced the street. This was by far the most interesting camera, as the datacentre was just around the corner from Crown Casino, a huge entertainment complex in Melbourne. Nothing livened up a dull nightshift as watching throngs of drunks, strays and vagabonds doing their thing at 5am.

There was one time, when I was safely on dayshift as it was, when the cameras recorded an assault right outside our building. As I remember it, the fellow who was on shift called the police and volunteered the tape to help identify the assailant.

This raises the issue of privacy. While it might be reasonable to help the police in dealing with a criminal offence, there were other times and other scenes that, while not criminal, might well have been of interest to a wider viewing audience, and would have been of great embarrassment to the participants, who were not aware of the well hidden camera.

Private companies operate transport services and many sports stadiums have cameras strategically placed to film the public. I wonder about what rights and obligations these private entities have to protect the privacy of the people that they film.

I think that Big Brother is big enough and doesn’t need any little helpers.

From WorldNetDaily:

Congressional investigators say they can’t assure the public that individuals’ personal data is being adequately protected from unauthorized reading, alteration or disclosure.

In a survey of 25 federal agencies and departments, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found a lack of compliance with the federal Privacy Act of 1974 significant enough to conclude “the government cannot assure the public that individual privacy rights are being protected.”

“Federal agencies are not following the law and, as a result, the personal data of citizens may be improperly collected and poorly protected,” Brase adds, “One system of records holds data on 290 million people. If that system happens to be one of the systems that’s out of compliance, the privacy rights of every citizen have already been violated, perhaps many times.”