From: "Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 16:39:18 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: IP: Big Brother Is Monitoring Us by Databases - Sept. PSR - Part 1
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From: ignition-point@majordomo.pobox.com
Subject: IP: Big Brother Is Monitoring Us by Databases - Sept. PSR - Part 1
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 17:28:57 -0500
To: PSR@eagleforum.org

	PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY REPORT   
						September 1998

          Big Brother Is Monitoring Us by Databases 
   
 The hottest issue in America today is our discovery that the Federal
 Government is trying to tag, track and monitor our health care
 records through national databases and personal identification
 numbers. This is a priority election issue, and every Congressional
 and Senatorial candidate should be ready to answer questions from
 his constituents. 

 Americans are accustomed to enjoying the freedom to go about our
 daily lives without telling government what we are doing. The idea of
 having Big Brother monitor our life and activities, as forecast in
 George Orwell's great book 1984, is not acceptable in America. 

 Unfortunately, the liberals, who always seek control over how we live
 our lives and how we spend our money, are using terrorists,
 criminals, illegal aliens, welfare cheats, and deadbeat dads as
 excuses to impose oppressive government surveillance over our
 private lives. It is typical of the liberals to go after law-abiding citizens
 rather than just the law-violators. 

 Modern technology has made it possible to build a file on every
 American, and to record and track our comings and goings.
 Computers can now collect and store immense databases, with
 detailed records about individual Americans' health status and
 treatment, job status and applications, automobiles and driving,
 financial transactions, credit, banking, school and college
 performance, and travels within and without the country. 

 In the novel 1984, an omnipresent Big Brother watched every citizen
 at home and work from a giant television screen. Databases can now
 accomplish the same surveillance and tracking much more
 efficiently. In the novel 1984, Big Brother was able to read the
 individual's secret diary hidden in his home. The Clinton
 Administration and the FBI are right now demanding the right to read
 our e-mail and computer files, listen in on our phone conversations,
 and track the whereabouts of our cell phone calls. 

 Some of these databases are under the direct control of the
 government (e.g., Internal Revenue, Social Security, and the
 Department of Education, which has amassed 15 national
 databases), and some are privately owned but give access to the
 government. These databases convey enormous power to whoever
 controls them. In government hands, they are the power to control
 our very life, our health care, our access to a job, our financial
 transactions, and our entry to school and college. In private hands,
 these databases are immensely profitable to the companies that own
 them and market them for commercial purposes. 

 The Clinton Administration, Congress, big corporations that funnel
 million of dollars of soft money into political coffers, and some
 powerful foundations have cooperated in seeking federal legislation to
 establish a property right in these databases. So much power and
 money are involved in accessing and controlling personal information
 that the Washington lobbyists are moving rapidly to lock in the
 extraordinary powers Congress has already conferred on those who
 build databases and to build a wall of federal protection around them. 

 If we want to preserve American freedom, it's time to stop government
 access to these databases. Let's look at some of the ways that
 Clinton and Congress have cooperated in the building of databases
 that tag, track and monitor our daily lives. 

    1.The 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum law (the Health Insurance
      Portability and Accountability Act) gives the Department of
      Health and Human Services (HHS) the power to create
      "unique health care identifiers" so that government can
      electronically tag, track and monitor every citizen's personal
      medical records. The plan is that everyone must submit an
      identification document with a unique number in order to
      receive health care, or the provider will not be paid. A
      database containing every American's medical records,
      identified by a unique number, was a central feature of
      Clinton's defeated 1994 health care bill, but it reemerged in the
      Kennedy-Kassebaum bill. Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and Bob
      Dole all bragged about passing this law. 

    2.H.R. 4250, the 1998 Patient Protection Act, passed by the
      House on July 24, 1998, will allow anyone who maintains
      personal medical records to gather, exchange and distribute
      them. The only condition on distribution is that the information
      be used for "health care operations," which is vague and
      meaningless. 

      Even worse, H.R. 4250 preempts state laws that currently
      protect patients from unauthorized distribution of their medical
      records. There are several exemptions to the gathering of
      information that reveal the liberal bias of the drafters of this bill:
      The bill exempts from the gathering of medical records any
      information about abortions performed on minors. That
      provision is a sure sign of the kind of control of health care
      that this bill opens up. 

    3.The Collections of Information Antipiracy Act (which
      originally had another number) was added (just before House
      passage) to H.R. 2281, the 1998 WIPO Copyright Treaties
      Implementation Act and the Internet Copyright Infringement
      Liability Clarification Act. No one, of course, is in favor of
      "piracy," but this bill goes far beyond any reasonable definition
      of piracy. 

      This Collections of Information bill, in effect, creates a new
      federal property right to own, manage and control personal
      information about you, including your name, address,
      telephone number, medical records, and "any other intangible
      material capable of being collected and organized in a
      systematic way." This bill provides a powerful incentive for
      corporations to build nationwide databases of the personal
      medical information envisioned by the Kennedy-Kassebaum
      law and the Patient Protection bill. This bill will encourage
      health care corporations to assign a unique national health
      identifier to each patient. The government can then simply
      agree to use a privately-assigned national identifier, and
      Clinton's longtime goal of government control of health care
      will be achieved. 

      Under the Collections of Information bill, any information about
      you can be owned and controlled by others under protection of
      Federal law. Your medical chart detailing your visits to your
      doctor, for example, would suddenly become the federally
      protected property of other persons or corporations, and their
      rights would be protected by Federal police power. This bill
      creates a new Federal crime that penalizes a first offense by a
      fine of up to $250,000 or imprisonment for up to five years, or
      both, for interfering with this new property right. It even
      authorizes Federal judges to order seizure of property before a
      finding of wrongdoing. 

      H.R. 2281 grants these new Federal rights only to private
      databases, and pretends to exclude the government's own
      efforts to collect information about citizens. But a loophole in
      the bill permits private firms to share their federally protected
      data with the government so long as the information is not
      collected under a specific government agency or license
      agreement. This loophole will encourage corporations,
      foundations, Washington insiders and political donors to build
      massive databases of citizens' medical and other personal
      records, and then share that data with the government. 

    4.The 1993 Comprehensive Child Immunization Act
      authorized the Department of Health and Human Services "to
      establish state registry systems to monitor the immunization
      status of all children." HHS and the Robert Wood Johnson
      Foundation have since sent hundreds of millions of dollars to
      states to set up these databases (often without parental
      knowledge or consent). 

      The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is aggressively trying
      to convert these state databases into a national database of
      all children's medical records. The CDC is using the tracking
      of immunizations as a ruse to build a national patient
      information system. The government is already demanding
      that all newborns and all children who enter school be given
      the controversial Hepatitis B vaccine. This is just the start of
      government control of our health care made possible by
      databases of medical records. 

    5.The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
      Responsibility Act (especially Section 656(b)) prohibits the
      use of state driver's licenses after Oct. 1, 2000 unless they
      contain Social Security numbers as the unique numeric
      identifier "that can be read visually or by electronic means."
      The act requires all driver's licenses to conform to regulations
      promulgated by the Secretary of Transportation, and it is
      clearly an attempt to convert driver's licenses into national I.D.
      Cards. This law also orders the Transportation Department to
      engage in "consultation" with the American Association of
      Motor Vehicle Administrators, which has long urged using
      driver's licenses, with Social Security numbers and digital
      fingerprinting, as a de facto national ID card that would enable
      the government to track everyone's movements throughout
      North America. 

      When Social Security was started, the government made a
      contract with the American people that the Social Security
      number would never be used for identification. Call this another
      broken promise. 

      Meanwhile, many states are already trying to legislate driver's
      licenses that are actually a "smart card" with a magnetic strip
      that contains a digitized fingerprint, retina scan, DNA print,
      voice print, or other biometric identifiers. These smart cards
      will leave an electronic trail every time you use it. New
      Jersey's proposed smart card would even track your payment
      of bridge and highway tolls and loans of books from the library,
      as well as credit card purchases and visits to your doctor. 

    6.The 1996 Welfare Reform Act (the Personal Responsibility
      and Work Opportunity Reform Act) sets up the Directory of
      New Hires. All employers are now required to send the
      government the name, address and Social Security number of
      every new worker and every employee who is promoted. This
      will eventually be a massive database, tracking nearly every
      worker in America. 

    7.Public-private partnerships. An example of how databases
      and copyrights, in partnerships with the government, can be
      used for private gain and control over millions of people is the
      way the American Medical Association (AMA) worked out an
      exclusive contract with the Health Care Financing
      Administration (HCFA), a division of the Department of Health
      and Human Services (HHS). The AMA developed and
      copyrighted a database of 6,000 medical procedures and
      treatments to use as a billing system. The AMA then
      contracted with HCFA to force the entire health care industry
      (including all doctors) to buy and use the AMA's system. 

 A federal Court of Appeals reviewed this peculiar AMA/HCFA
 arrangement and, in August 1997, held that the AMA had "misused
 its copyright by licensing the [payment coding system] to HCFA in
 exchange for HCFA's agreement not to use a competing coding
 system." The court stated, "The plain language of the AMA's
 licensing agreement requires HCFA to use the AMA's copyrighted
 coding system and prohibits HCFA from using any other." 

 This exclusive government-granted monopoly is worth tens of millions
 of dollars annually to the AMA, and it ensures the AMA's support of
 any Clinton health care proposal, no matter how socialistic. This type
 of public-private partnership, often concealed from public scrutiny, is
 becoming the preferred technique to advance the liberal agenda. 

 The American people do not want their private life and activities
 monitored by Big Brother. Tell your Congressman and Senator to
 repeal all these provisions which protect the building of databases
 that track our daily activities. 

	------------------------------------

To read the entire September 98 PSR go to:
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/1998/sept98/psrsept98.html

	------------------------------------

The "Dirty Dozen" . . .   Here are the 12
Republicans who voted to uphold Clinton's veto of
the partial-birth abortion ban.
http://www.eagleforum.org/alert/98-09-22/dirty_dozen.html

	------------------------------------

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