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IP: Big Brother Is Monitoring Us by Databases - Sept. PSR - Part 1
From: [email protected]
Subject: IP: Big Brother Is Monitoring Us by Databases - Sept. PSR - Part 1
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1998 17:28:57 -0500
To: [email protected]
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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