Dr. Deborah Peel, chairwoman of the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, views the patient information not as a goldmine ripe for exploitation but as a collection of personal and sensitive health information that needs to be zealously guarded and only accessed with express consent by the patient.
[snip]
The data-mining project means that end users will have access to clinical data on millions of people, Peel said, adding that “to date, the government and the American health care industry has shown an extraordinary lack of commitment to health data privacy and security.”
Also, on a different note, from secrecynews:
White House "Strongly Opposes" Intel Budget Disclosure
The Bush Administration formally notified the Senate this week that it objects to a provision in a pending bill on homeland security that would require publication of the annual intelligence budget total.
"The Administration strongly opposes the requirement in the bill to publicly disclose sensitive information about the intelligence budget."
"Disclosure, including disclosure to the Nation's enemies and adversaries in a time of war, of the amounts requested by the President and provided by the Congress for the conduct of the Nation's intelligence activities would provide no meaningful information to the general American public, but would provide significant intelligence to America's adversaries and could cause damage to the national security interests of the United States," the White House statement said.
It is hard to find a serious intelligence professional who agrees with this White House view.
Because the intelligence budget total is a high-level aggregate of spending levels in more than a dozen different agencies, its intelligence value to U.S. adversaries is practically nil, since funding for any particular program is insulated many layers beneath the enormous top-line figure. On the other hand, disclosure of the total figure would provide the public with a reliable index of the magnitude of intelligence spending to compare with spending on other national priorities.
Finally, The CPA Lives. They will never learn:
"I'm a retired army general and I'm here to do business in Iraq," he said. "That in itself is a message."
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