Tech

There ought to be…

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Family member A is ill — cold? flu? Gets worse. Calls doctor.

Doctor is away. A speaks with doctor’s colleague. Colleague listens to A’s account of symptoms, tells A to go to emergency room.

Family member B accompanies A to hospital. Emergency-room doctor examines A — infection? what’s that thing in lungs? Doctor asks if recent chest x-ray is available. B and C (me) consult by phone. B tells emergency-room guy to call A’s doctor’s office to access whatever records are there. Meanwhile I track down most-recent CT-scan records at another hospital. B is now driving there to pick up a disk with the scans on it.

In the middle of our discussions B says something like: This is crazy. All of these records should be centrally accessible and under the control of the patient. Why isn’t all of the information we need available online?

B is right. In the current system service providers control most of the information but have little incentive to coordinate access with other service providers. Indeed there is a disincentive to do so: they can get into trouble if information is misused but don’t benefit directly when improved information-sharing helps patients.

Technically, this is not a difficult problem. Institutionally and legally, however, it seems to have much in common with drug-resistant bacteria.

At least there is progress in other areas. The practice of medicine itself seems to improve over time. And thank God for cellphones, and for the technology that makes it possible to put a copy of a CT scan onto a computer disk in a few minutes.

Fun Fact

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If you submit electronic files (e.g., digital photographs) on a CD to the US Copyright Office as part of a copyright application, the Copyright Office stores your CD but does not transfer the files on it to its computers or other durable media. There is also no way to resubmit or otherwise replace electronic files stored in the Copyright Office archives if the magnetic or optical media you submitted them on deteriorate.

This appears to mean that the registrations for many copyrighted photographs will become legally indefensible if/when the CDs on which the images were submitted deteriorate. The person with whom I spoke at the Copyright Office suggested submitting photographic prints or contact sheets rather than CDs. This suggestion would have been good advice until recently, but it’s impractical for people who copyright large numbers of digital photos.

I have no idea if the deteriorating-media issue will become a significant problem. Maybe not: the odds that any particular image file submitted in a copyright application will be needed to defend a copyright are low. Happily, the Copyright Office is testing a system that allows copyright registrants to upload image files over the Internet, and this new system should eliminate the CD issue for people who use it. But the many files that have been and will be submitted on CDs and DVDs are still vulnerable.

More on Communications Intercepts

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On Friday, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey sent a letter to House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes. Note this sentence:

We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress’ failure to act.

My previous post on this subject is here.

At the Stroke of Midnight

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At midnight on Saturday, certain statutory authorizations for the interception of terrorist communications were allowed–by congressional inaction–to expire. See the National Review article with the headline: When the Clock Strikes Midnight, We Will Be Significantly Less Safe; also President Bush’s radio address here.

A couple of months ago, Shannon Love addressed some of the issues involved in commuications intercepts. This seems like an appropriate time for some additional discussion on the topic.

Some other useful resources:

1)The White House fact sheet

2)A fairly long article (PDF) which discusses some of the technical complexities which affect this debate.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Robert Novak says: The true cause for blocking the bill was the Senate-passed retroactive immunity from lawsuits for private telecommunications firms asked to eavesdrop by the government. The nation’s torts bar, vigorously pursuing such suits, has spent months lobbying hard against immunity.

The recess by House Democrats amounts to a judgment that losing the generous support of trial lawyers, the Democratic Party’s most important financial base, is more dangerous than losing the anti-terrorist issue to Republicans.

I’m not much of a Robert Novak fan, but in this case, I’m afraid his statement contains a strong element of truth.

UPDATE 2: William Kristol on Orwell, Kipling, and the responsibilities of governing, with particular reference to the communications-intercept issue.

See also this post and discussion at Neptunus Lex.

Bad Design

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I usually carry my cell phone in my trouser pocket. My previous cell phones were non-folders and occasionally made calls on their own even though I used the “key lock” feature. (One phone dialed 911. I found out about it because a 911 dispatcher called back to ask if I was OK.) So I made sure that the next phone was a folding model.

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