If you have ever been in a hospital, doctor's office, dentist's office, nursing home, or any other healthcare facility, then there is already quite a large number of people who have access to your SSN. In fact, it's typically listed on the front page (face sheet) of the chart conveniently placed near your address history, phone numbers, date of birth, and any other piece of information that might be useful on a credit card application.
People who look at the face sheet as part of their job:
1. Doctors, Nurses, Physical Therapists, Dietitians, PAs, PharmDs, social workers, CNAs, techs, porters, Ambulance drivers/paramedics, and dozens of other professions
2. Students of any of the above mentioned professions
3. Billing, medical records, filing, charge entry, or accounts receivable clerks
4. Scores of other employees at the insurance company end
People who have access to this information when no one is looking:
1. Anyone wearing scrubs or a white coat with a photoshopped ID
2. Secretaries, security guards, volunteers, janitors, inspectors, auditors, office managers, IT people
Yes, I realize that the vast majority of these people would never abuse this information, but all it takes is one person. And while if a pattern of thefts occurs, it may be possible to trace back and identify the culprit based on shared victim characteristics (they all were residents of hospital X), it's really too late by that point. Who cares if the guy is arrested when 1000s of people have had their credit history ruined. Also, a crook could simply bribe different minimum wage clerks at several different healthcare facilities and make it almost impossible to establish a pattern.
It may not be as spectacular as "hacking a database," but rest assured that this information is readily available to any scumbag with minimal social engineering skills (or a half-baked disguise), albeit probably not in the same quantity (it would take a while to photocopy 800,000 face sheets). But keep in mind also that nursing home residents and the like are not exactly the type of people who religiously check their credit report.
There is some hope, however. Many big hospitals are going EMR (Electronic Medical Records), and this should increase security by a good measure. Chances are though that your local family practice is going to stick with paper charts and is not going to lock them up at night (though they are required to by HIPAA and other regulations).
How could there possibly be any free exchange, ever, in a culture where censorship in the media is a fact of life, just like fluoride in the water. It just IS --no matter how many "parallel" projects there are. This makes me sick.
While I am sickened as well, I live in America and don't believe that we have any business criticizing "oppressive governments" for the suppression of information until I can feel comfortable browsing to any website on the internet containing political ideas without worrying about a free all-expenses paid trip to beautiful Guantanamo Bay.
Look, I'm no conspiracy theorist or libertarian nut, and I realize that browsing the news at aljazeera.com probably isn't Gitmo material. But, does anyone here have trouble believing the government might be using some kind of monitoring not unlike bayesian spam filtering, where simply sharing similar browsing patterns to known terrorists (or known residents of Gitmo) lands you on the watch list?
And before you say, "Fine, they might watch you, but if you have nothing to hide there's nothing to worry about," I have to vehemently disagree. All the government needs to have UAVs dropping Hellfires on you like shit from a Chicago pigeon is some kind of connection to "terrorism." Drive a limo for Bin Laden? Have a phone call with someone who was roommate with Al Zawahiri? Go to a mosque that "gave money to terrorism?" Live next to a mosque that "gave money to terrorism?" Happen to be in the same room as a terrorist when the UAV is flying by? Hope you like the smell of RDX.
Not sure about the recombinant albumin, but part of my job involves pharmaceutical purchasing, and a vial of 20mL of 25% human serum albumin can be obtained for approximately $13. The human version is produced by precipitation from donated blood and is used quite routinely in the hospital to treat various conditions such as shock or malnutrition. Also, many medications are packaged with albumin in the vial (to provide a binding surface for the drug molecules).
I would say though that the "manufactured in an industrial scale" statement is a bit misleading. Purified blood proteins in general are ungodly expensive. For instance, immunoglobins, which you might get to protect you against infection if you've been exposed to, say, Hepatitis B or C, are some of the most expensive drugs we have, ranging up into the thousands of $ per shot. Most of these are refined from human blood, but even if you have trillions of bacteria slaving away for you producing recombinant proteins, it's the purification and quality control steps that are the killer.
...the current level of complexity could not have developed in a set of incremental changes.
I disagree with this (frequently held) belief. If you and I were hunter-gatherers from the Stone Age and we walked through a time portal into a modern concert hall, where a pianist was playing Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto, we would no doubt be incapable of believing that all of what we were seeing and hearing was developed over the last ten thousand years or so by "incremental changes."
A piano is a fiendishly complex instrument, with thousands of precisely crafted parts. The frame is under literally tons of force, while the keys are made of a material (plastic) whose composition and manufacture would utterly bewilder a Stone Age man.
The art of piano playing is no less complex, requiring many physically unintuitive motions and (to a cave man) superhuman coordination. The truly vast nature of the systems underlying the harmony, rhythms and composition of the music itself and the process by which the music is transcribed by the composer onto the printed page and ultimately read and enacted by the performer is equally staggering.
We might say to each other, "Surely beings from another world came and gifted man with this instrument and the ability to play the music we hear upon it! For, no man could have possessed the knowledge to craft such a thing, and even were the instrument a divine gift, to devise this system of music and develop the adroitness to play it would surely be far beyond him!" It would appear, essentially, to be a chicken and the egg problem.
But, as we know, the piano did indeed come into being via incremental changes from earlier keyboard instruments, themselves preceded by a legacy of stringed instruments. Piano playing is a tradition incrementally developed over hundreds of years, passed on from teacher to student. Western musical theory and composition is a discipline with a similar pattern of development. But, it only seems to reside in the realm of possibility since we are aware of the intermediate steps, recorded for us by scholars and historians.
This example is regarding something with a development history of hundreds of years (perhaps a few thousand for Western Music as a whole), but imagine how quickly our ability to comprehend the development of complex systems disappears when we begin to discuss things on a time scale one million times as great. Furthermore, it is much easier for us to understand something like how the diatonic scale system arose, than it is to fathom the origins of the Golgi Apparatus and its ilk.
Slashdot Mirror
People who look at the face sheet as part of their job:
1. Doctors, Nurses, Physical Therapists, Dietitians, PAs, PharmDs, social workers, CNAs, techs, porters, Ambulance drivers/paramedics, and dozens of other professions
2. Students of any of the above mentioned professions
3. Billing, medical records, filing, charge entry, or accounts receivable clerks
4. Scores of other employees at the insurance company end
People who have access to this information when no one is looking:
1. Anyone wearing scrubs or a white coat with a photoshopped ID
2. Secretaries, security guards, volunteers, janitors, inspectors, auditors, office managers, IT people
Yes, I realize that the vast majority of these people would never abuse this information, but all it takes is one person. And while if a pattern of thefts occurs, it may be possible to trace back and identify the culprit based on shared victim characteristics (they all were residents of hospital X), it's really too late by that point. Who cares if the guy is arrested when 1000s of people have had their credit history ruined. Also, a crook could simply bribe different minimum wage clerks at several different healthcare facilities and make it almost impossible to establish a pattern.
It may not be as spectacular as "hacking a database," but rest assured that this information is readily available to any scumbag with minimal social engineering skills (or a half-baked disguise), albeit probably not in the same quantity (it would take a while to photocopy 800,000 face sheets). But keep in mind also that nursing home residents and the like are not exactly the type of people who religiously check their credit report.
There is some hope, however. Many big hospitals are going EMR (Electronic Medical Records), and this should increase security by a good measure. Chances are though that your local family practice is going to stick with paper charts and is not going to lock them up at night (though they are required to by HIPAA and other regulations).
How could there possibly be any free exchange, ever, in a culture where censorship in the media is a fact of life, just like fluoride in the water. It just IS --no matter how many "parallel" projects there are. This makes me sick.
While I am sickened as well, I live in America and don't believe that we have any business criticizing "oppressive governments" for the suppression of information until I can feel comfortable browsing to any website on the internet containing political ideas without worrying about a free all-expenses paid trip to beautiful Guantanamo Bay.
Look, I'm no conspiracy theorist or libertarian nut, and I realize that browsing the news at aljazeera.com probably isn't Gitmo material. But, does anyone here have trouble believing the government might be using some kind of monitoring not unlike bayesian spam filtering, where simply sharing similar browsing patterns to known terrorists (or known residents of Gitmo) lands you on the watch list?
And before you say, "Fine, they might watch you, but if you have nothing to hide there's nothing to worry about," I have to vehemently disagree. All the government needs to have UAVs dropping Hellfires on you like shit from a Chicago pigeon is some kind of connection to "terrorism." Drive a limo for Bin Laden? Have a phone call with someone who was roommate with Al Zawahiri? Go to a mosque that "gave money to terrorism?" Live next to a mosque that "gave money to terrorism?" Happen to be in the same room as a terrorist when the UAV is flying by? Hope you like the smell of RDX.
Not sure about the recombinant albumin, but part of my job involves pharmaceutical purchasing, and a vial of 20mL of 25% human serum albumin can be obtained for approximately $13. The human version is produced by precipitation from donated blood and is used quite routinely in the hospital to treat various conditions such as shock or malnutrition. Also, many medications are packaged with albumin in the vial (to provide a binding surface for the drug molecules).
I would say though that the "manufactured in an industrial scale" statement is a bit misleading. Purified blood proteins in general are ungodly expensive. For instance, immunoglobins, which you might get to protect you against infection if you've been exposed to, say, Hepatitis B or C, are some of the most expensive drugs we have, ranging up into the thousands of $ per shot. Most of these are refined from human blood, but even if you have trillions of bacteria slaving away for you producing recombinant proteins, it's the purification and quality control steps that are the killer.
...the current level of complexity could not have developed in a set of incremental changes.
I disagree with this (frequently held) belief. If you and I were hunter-gatherers from the Stone Age and we walked through a time portal into a modern concert hall, where a pianist was playing Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto, we would no doubt be incapable of believing that all of what we were seeing and hearing was developed over the last ten thousand years or so by "incremental changes."
A piano is a fiendishly complex instrument, with thousands of precisely crafted parts. The frame is under literally tons of force, while the keys are made of a material (plastic) whose composition and manufacture would utterly bewilder a Stone Age man.
The art of piano playing is no less complex, requiring many physically unintuitive motions and (to a cave man) superhuman coordination. The truly vast nature of the systems underlying the harmony, rhythms and composition of the music itself and the process by which the music is transcribed by the composer onto the printed page and ultimately read and enacted by the performer is equally staggering.
We might say to each other, "Surely beings from another world came and gifted man with this instrument and the ability to play the music we hear upon it! For, no man could have possessed the knowledge to craft such a thing, and even were the instrument a divine gift, to devise this system of music and develop the adroitness to play it would surely be far beyond him!" It would appear, essentially, to be a chicken and the egg problem.
But, as we know, the piano did indeed come into being via incremental changes from earlier keyboard instruments, themselves preceded by a legacy of stringed instruments. Piano playing is a tradition incrementally developed over hundreds of years, passed on from teacher to student. Western musical theory and composition is a discipline with a similar pattern of development. But, it only seems to reside in the realm of possibility since we are aware of the intermediate steps, recorded for us by scholars and historians.
This example is regarding something with a development history of hundreds of years (perhaps a few thousand for Western Music as a whole), but imagine how quickly our ability to comprehend the development of complex systems disappears when we begin to discuss things on a time scale one million times as great. Furthermore, it is much easier for us to understand something like how the diatonic scale system arose, than it is to fathom the origins of the Golgi Apparatus and its ilk.