it should.
We've been reading up on the federal government's progress toward creating a new medical database, called the National Health Information Network. The idea is to create a more efficient system for keeping and sharing patient information. Ultimately, we'll all have electronic health records.
We're not Luddites. We appreciate the potential for computerization to boost efficiency, reduce costs and improve service in health care, and many other sectors.
But it's hard to think about electronic health records, potentially accessible to government agents as well as doctors and hospitals, without pausing to consider the broader picture. It's not just our personal health records being assembled into databases, but also airline passenger information, banking and other financial records; there's a proposal to expand enrollment records and other information now collected on government financial aid recipients to all college students; and, of course, talk of creating a national ID card containing fingerprints and encoded computer chips just won't die. There are plausible and constructive arguments for most of these things (save for the national ID), but the more readily available data the government collects on citizens, the greater the temptation will be to rationalize the use of the information in ways that violates people's privacy.
Of course, government and private institutions have long amassed records on people. But the format of some of that information, along with the sheer volume of it, made misuse of that information difficult. But advancing technology is making it easier to sift and combine information in ways that leave privacy dependent on the ethics of those with access. It might be hard to imagine public servants ignoring privacy laws. But who ever thought we'd have people at the highest levels of government redefining "torture." Is your privacy threatened? It could come down to your definition of "is."
Go ahead, roll your eyes. We used to think privacy zealots were a little unbalanced ourselves. But that was before the government started insisting it's essential to national security to monitor the reading habits of its citizens or tap phones without a search warrant. That was before we learned about how the FBI and other agencies spied on thousands of law-abiding citizens whose political views branded them as potential threats to security. That was before we saw a ham-handed researcher accidentally post dozens of people's psychological records on the Internet.
While we understand the potential good the government can do by trolling through databases, we can't help think of that unlucky Oregon lawyer whose fingerprint the FBI was just sure it found in connection with a terrorist attack in Spain. Oops!
Since Sept. 11, we've heard an awful lot about the need to shift the balance between privacy and security, about how we need to give the government more license in order to protect us. But we can't help noticing that the government has been noticeably more successful at coming up with new ways to collect and use information on citizens than it has in demonstrating tangible gains in anyone's security.
All we're really saying is that the right to privacy is a whole lot easier to give up than regain. We need to think through the implications of every privacy protection before we surrender it.
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