Interesting People mailing list archives

Patriot Act search


From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 16:56:10 -0400


Date: Sun, 27 Jul 2003 12:24:18 -0700
From: Simon Higgs <simon () higgs com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Patriot Act search
X-Sender: simon () higgs com
To: dave () farber net


At 01:56 PM 7/26/2003 -0400, you wrote:

My experience is that title search companies will do that for anyone calling cold and identifying themselves as a realtor in the middle of a transaction. A friend with a collections agency background did this once in front of me. In under three minutes he had the full record that he was looking for.

Also on another note, I fired my daughter's pediatrician last week. He refused to see my daughter on an urgent-care visit because I refused to sign a sight-unseen agreement to his new privacy policy - which I discovered ran to multiple pages of single-space small print. He also refused to show me a copy of the HIPAA law which he claimed to derive his privacy policy. On the brief examination of his policy (I wasn't allowed to keep a copy), I could not see anywhere where my daughter's privacy (or mine) was protected. It was a long list of circumstances, definitely not directly related to patient treatment, where he would release patient information. Some of it seemed to cover releasing information to law enforcement (deriving from the Patriot Act maybe?) which could be expected. But my brief understanding of what I read told me that patient records could be released (read "sold") for research covering marketing, statistical data, and everything else to all comers (i.e. it did not appear to be limited to the actual process required for patient treatment per HIPAA). Isn't there a doctor's ethical mandate of putting the patient first? I'm getting fed up with needing a degree in accounting and law before receiving proper medical attention.

Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2003 22:06:47 -0400
From: Scott Alexander <salex () dsl cis upenn edu>
Subject: Patriot Act search
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>

We have refinanced our house and today was the closing.  Among the
documents we had to look at was a long list of judgments against people
with names remotely similar to ours.  At the end it was a "Patriot
Search" statement saying that our names did not appear.  Presumably
there are two aspects to this.  I suspect that those having a false
match on this list will not only make flying difficult as previously
discussed on IP, but will also make getting a mortgage difficult.  OTOH,
I'd suspect that finding a title company willing to run a few extra
searches would allow a terrorist cell to find which of their members
were listed with very little risk.

Best,
Scott

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Best Regards,

Simon Higgs

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The Blog: http://www.simonhiggs.com/

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