Electronic medical records, worst idea ever now with added worse!

I'm just going to post this, there's no point in even trying to add snark:

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) wants to require health care providers to include "social and behavioral" data in Electronic Health Records (EHR) and to link patient's records to public health departments, it was announced last week.

Health care experts say the proposal raises additional privacy concerns over Americans' personal health information, on top of worries that the Obamacare "data hub" could lead to abuse by bureaucrats and identify theft.

My American friends, you guys are going to end up with bar codes tattooed on your foreheads if you don't bring these DemocRats to heel, I'm telling you right now.

The Phantom

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No really, they're datamining your credit cards.

Expansion to my earlier post here, which was about datamining bankruptcy filings. I said they most likely did it to -everything- but had no proof. We now hear that yes, they really do record credit card transactions and data mine them.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau officials are seeking to monitor four out of every five U.S. consumer credit card transactions this year — up to 42 billion transactions – through a controversial data-mining program, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

A CFPB strategic planning document for fiscal years 2013-17 describes the "markets monitoring" program through which officials aim to monitor 80 percent of all credit card transactions in 2013.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 1.16 billion consumer credit cards were in use in 2012 for an estimated 52.6 billion transactions. If CFPB officials reach their stated "performance goal," they would collect data on 42 billion transactions made with 933 million credit cards used by American consumers.

In addition, CFPB officials hope to monitor up to 95 percent of all mortgage transactions, according to the planning document.

Well that's how many they "hope" to be able to monitor, so it says. How many did they already monitor?

The CFPB strategic plan shows that in 2012, the bureau was able to gain access to 77 percent of all credit cards and hoped to increase that to 80 percent in 2013. By 2014, the agency also hopes to monitor up to 95 percent of all mortgage transactions.

Why do all this? Well, why have a gun registry? So you can know who's got a gun, right? If you can capture all credit card and mortgage transactions, that's a registry of EVERYTHING. You have a record of every fricking thing that everybody in the country owns.

From that you can tell who's got more income than they are showing, you can tell who's got a mistress, you can tell who's a Republican. For that matter you can tell who's pregnant. From such a database its entirely feasible to decide from what books, magazines, clothing, tools, cosmetics, toilet paper or whatever people buy who is politically reliable and who isn't. And then make a list of the ones you don't like and send a DHS armored car around to their house.

Oh NO Phantom, that could NEVER happen! This is the USA! Home of the free lunch!

Lets review, shall we?

Is there any possible legitimate reason a government could have for needing to know all that? No. Not a chance.

Are there a wide variety of nefarious and evil purposes that such information could be put to? Yes indeed.

So friends, as you can see the toboggan ride toward the cliff is speeding up rapidly. Might still be time to stop before y'all go over the cliff, but it'll be pretty hard.

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"Shut up!" they explained.

Yes friends, having gotten as much traction and they are going to on gun control, the Dems are now moving along to speech control. Stating by defining a "journalist". Otherwise know as the "Saving the New York Times by killing the Internet" law.

A Senate panel on Thursday approved a measure defining a journalist, which had been an obstacle to broader media shield legislation designed to protect reporters and the news media from having to reveal their sources.

The Judiciary Committee's action cleared the way for approval of legislation prompted by the disclosure earlier this year that the Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed almost two months of telephone records for 21 phone lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press and secretly used a warrant to obtain some emails of a Fox News journalist. The subpoenas grew out of investigations into leaks of classified information to the news organizations.

The AP received no advance warning of the subpoena.

The vote was 13-5 for a compromise defining a "covered journalist" as an employee, independent contractor or agent of an entity that disseminates news or information. The individual would have been employed for one year within the last 20 or three months within the last five years.

Now, I should say right here that if the AP thinks that the NSA isn't recording 100% of every damn thing that every single individual at the AP says and does on-line and by phone, from the CEO to the night janitor , 24/7/365, then the AP is living in a dream world. Because the NSA is most certainly doing all of that, at the very least.

What this is about is a fig leaf of legality so the DemocRats can give their good friends in the media a "get-out-of-jail-free" card while going after everyone else with the full weight of the US federal government. Everyone else meaning blogs.

[Senator Dianne Feinstein, D. Ca] said the intent was to set up a test to determine a bona fide journalist.

"I think journalism has a certain tradecraft. It's a profession. I recognize that everyone can think they're a journalist," Feinstein said.

Translation, Dianne Feinstein gets to decide who will to talk and when, not you. So shut up and get back to work, peons.

Watch out for the steep part, kids!

My predictions:

1. There will be journalism licenses issued in the United States of America before the 2016 elections. Possibly before the 2014 election.
2. The bill will receive bi-partisan support.
   

Because I bet you the Republicans want the internet to shut up even worse than the DemocRats do. The Tea Party can only beat the Dems if they stage a revolution in the Republican Party first.

This is why they call it a slippery slope my friends. Because the ride picks up speed quickly as you go along. Then you get to the 100 foot cliff...

The Phantom

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Functioning mechanical gears seen in nature for the first time.

Wheels and gears aren't seen in nature. Until now.

The juvenile Issus - a plant-hopping insect found in gardens across Europe - has hind-leg joints with curved cog-like strips of opposing 'teeth' that intermesh, rotating like mechanical gears to synchronise the animal's legs when it launches into a jump.
The finding demonstrates that gear mechanisms previously thought to be solely man-made have an evolutionary precedent. Scientists say this is the "first observation of mechanical gearing in a biological structure".
Through a combination of anatomical analysis and high-speed video capture of normal Issus movements, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to reveal these functioning natural gears for the first time. The findings are reported in the latest issue of the journal Science.
The gears in the Issus hind-leg bear remarkable engineering resemblance to those found on every bicycle and inside every car gear-box.

There's a picture of the structure. It looks like two quarter circles side by side, with meshing gear teeth. Absolutely crazy.

The Phantom Gearhead

Update: I finally figured out what those gears remind me of.

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This is me ignoring Barry and his speech.

From Blazing Catfur, a sagacious suggestion: tomorrow being 9/11/2013, anniversary of the World Trade Center atrocity AND the Benghazi attack last year, why don't we all just ignore Barrack Hussein Obama and his Short Victorious War bullshit for the whole day?

I think this is a genius idea, and I will therefore not mention The One nor any of his works tomorrow.

...and the horse he rode in on.

The Phantom

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Yes they DO datamine your credit cards.

From our "Always Pay Cash" file, the US federal government has a whole bureaucracy that datamines your financial information.

Serious allegations are being raised in the legal community that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has recruited the U.S. Trustee Program to collect bankruptcy data on its behalf to aid a controversial data-mining program.

Documents obtained by the Washington Examiner describe efforts by the CFPB to collect a decade's worth of private financial data on the consumer behavior of five million American citizens without their knowledge or consent. The CFPB data-mining campaign has alarmed privacy watchdogs.

Again, this is an effort by some US government alphabet-soup shitheads, working through the courts, to access information protected by attorney client privilege which they are flatly not allowed to look at. And again, this is most likely information that moved over the phone lines at some point in its life, and is archived on the mega-server from Hell at NSA. Don't go bankrupt!

From our "Lying Bastards" file, which at this point has its own warehouse and forklift trucks, NSA lied to the courts for -years-.

The National Security Agency's searches of a database containing phone records of millions of Americans violated privacy protections for years by failing to meet a court-ordered standard, intelligence officials acknowledged Tuesday.

They said the violations continued until a judge ordered an overhaul of the program in 2009.

The revelations called into question NSA's ability to run the sweeping domestic surveillance programs it introduced more than a decade ago in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Officials said the violations were inadvertent, because NSA officials didn't understand their own phone-records collection program.

How bad did they lie?

Since the details and the breadth of the phone-records collection came to light through leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, lawmakers and top U.S. officials have defended the program. They have said for all queries of the database, the NSA must show a "reasonable articulable suspicion" that the phone number being targeted is associated with a terrorist organization.

Between 2006 and 2009, however, of the 17,835 phone numbers checked against incoming phone records, only about 2,000 were based on that reasonable suspicion standard, officials said.

About 89% lying, then. Like a Persian carpet, pretty much. They did whatever the hell they wanted, you might say.

Are we getting hacked off yet, Americans?

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New revelation, the NSA can hack Blackberry!

Hey Canada, NSA is listening to your Blackberries!

SPIEGEL has learned from internal NSA documents that the US intelligence agency has the capability of tapping user data from the iPhone, devices using Android as well as BlackBerry, a system previously believed to be highly secure.

Previously we knew that Android and Apple products tracked their users locations, phoning home back to the big Google and Apple servers with that data regularly. Apple updated about every ten minutes and uploaded to the servers several times a day. One of the reasons iPhones are data-hogs. NSA of course has access to all that data because they record EVERYTHING, but according to Der Spiegel they can also just hack and crack your phone.

And your Blackberry!

The documents suggest the intelligence specialists have also had similar success in hacking into BlackBerrys. A 2009 NSA document states that it can "see and read SMS traffic." It also notes there was a period in 2009 when the NSA was temporarily unable to access BlackBerry devices. After the Canadian company acquired another firm the same year, it changed the way in compresses its data. But in March 2010, the department responsible at Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency declared in a top secret document it had regained access to BlackBerry data and celebrated with the word, "champagne!"

The documents also state that the NSA has succeeded in accessing the BlackBerry mail system, which is known to be very secure. This could mark a huge setback for the company, which has always claimed that its mail system is uncrackable.

Just goes to show, nothing is uncrackable if you throw enough cubic yards of money at it.

All I know is, I want a gig selling hardware to the poindexters at NSA. The commission would be... epic!  I could buy a small country!

The Phantom

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