privacy

Google is unveiling a new personal health records service, Google Health

Ten years ago, a similar product might have saved me some serious heartache. I was ambulanced to an emergency room with chest pains, and the cardiologist on call diagnosed me as having a heart attack. Not quite. If she had been able to access my medical history, she might have seen that my father had had an aortic aneurysm and checked for that. Instead, she put me on blood thinner, causing my aneurysm to bleed all the more and almost bringing my brilliant career, among other things, to an untimely end. Thanks to a surgeon-god named Paul Corso and a St. Jude's valve, I survived.

Jared Massey, tased by a Utah highway patrolman six months ago over a $107 speeding ticket, won a $40,000 settlement from the state of Utah.

Massey's gratuitous tasing shows the bright side of our Orwellian future: the video popped up on YouTube, and when the public outcry began, Utah paid out quick.

The left is starting to notice that ubiquitous surveillance cuts both ways. Citing privacy concerns, the ACLU opposes video surveillance in public places, but it has also begun distributing camcorders to citizens in a St. Louis neighborhood to monitor alleged police abuses. Barack Obama touts an Illinois law that requires police to videotape interrogations in murder cases. Cell-phone video portends a future where bystanders record police behavior everywhere, protecting good cops from false complaints and making it harder for bad cops to misbehave. MORE

Princeton researchers published a paper describing a devastating attack on standard encryption -- including encryption used to secure government secrets.

Data remain safe, most of the time.  The attacker needs access to the computer minutes after the user has walked away, and if he arrives later the data stay locked.  If the user guards the computer jealously, by clutching it close to the chest, or, as Atlantic employees with company-issued laptops are required to do, entrusting it during nights and weekends to a Gurkha security team, then even the geeks of Princeton can't get in.

One line from John Markham's informative NYT article stood out.  "The team [...] did not know if such an attack capability would compromise government computer information, because details of how classified computer data is protected are not publicly available."  Many readers will take this statement as a sign of government computers' security.

Security experts would suggest the opposite conclusion: vulnerabilities reveal themselves only when many eyes are looking for them.  It took so long to find this one because thousands of computer scientists and engineers all over the world have over the years collaborated to make encryption stronger.  The government's methods, if they are different, will have had none of the same scrutiny.  And other than a squad of Gurkhas, scrutiny is the only security worth having.