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Re: CPT letters to NYT
> Railing against computers is barking up the wrong tree.
So's arguing against a misinterpretation. As far as I can recall,
Jamie's never said that computers are bad or that records should not
be computerized, but stated the clear fact that computerization of
records is generally hazardous to privacy, and that the current proposal
treats offline and online records as if they are the same.
I read Jamie's position as asking for increased controls on computerized
medical records, because their potential for abuse is far greater than
that of paper records. That's certainly my position (though that does
not imply that this is an official EFF position at present).
Barring legislation preventing it, at some point almost all of your
personal information that has any value to businesses and police forces
is going to be in a database somewhere, and sooner or later those
databases are going to all be connected. The big-brother potential of a
system like that is absolutely staggering, and it's already well on the way.
The bill at hand can either contribute to the problem (and in its current
form I believe it will do so), or it can be a piece of legislation helping
prevent it. I for one would rather see the latter.
On a side note, I've seen a lot of "smoking gun" stuff pointing to links
between CDT, IBM, insurance companies, favorable press coverage for the
bill, and legislators. What I've not seen yet is CDT's side of this
story, and I'd like to. I am always highly skeptical of conspiracy theories.
However it's no surprise to me that the AMA and various trade
associations whose members depend heavily on reaping citizen medical
information consider this bill to be a "green light" fulfill their
fondest desires, whether or not IBM had anything to do with it, whether
or not CDT had anything to do with it, whether or not the AMA is lining
the pockets of Congressfolks: the bill has problems from a privacy
standpoint, and those problems almost by definition are pluses for the
personal info marketeers. Even CDT is not 100% pleased with this bill,
so I don't think the conspiracy theory is going to hold any water.
Clearly something is amok and awry here. As I've said before, we really
need to put our organizational heads together and either fix the bill or
kill it.
--
<HTML><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/~mech/"> Stanton McCandlish
</A><HR><A HREF="mailto:mech@eff.org"> mech@eff.org
</A><P><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/"> Electronic Frontier Foundation
</A><P><A HREF="http://www.eff.org/A/"> Online Activist </A></HTML>