privacy
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Hunt seeks to shed his duty to keep our medical data safe By Benedict Cooper
Last week in a public committee session of the Care Bill, MPs grilled Conservative ministers within the Department of Health over the dangers of the “unintended consequences” of changes to the way data is handled which could, they said, lead to private providers and insurance companies gaining access to confidential records. Continue reading
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UK national health records database to have ‘backdoors’ for police, govt?
While care.data will not store the names of the patients, it will include National Health System numbers, dates of birth, postcodes, ethnicity and sex, in addition to health condition and prescribed drugs. The goal is to sell access to the data to university researchers, health insurance companies and other parties, which can make use of… Continue reading
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Care.data questions mount – just who’ll get our medical data? By Jane Fae
Official attempts to inform patients about what will happen to their data when the new care.data database is implemented are inadequate and, on the latest evidence, seriously misleading. In August of last year, the Information Commissioner warned GPs they’d likely breach Data Protection Act if they allowed their patient data to be uploaded to care.data… Continue reading
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Police State UK: GCHQ secret unit uses DDOS attack tactics against Anonymous – Snowden leak
British intelligence has its own hacker subdivision that uses questionable practices for hunting down enemies of the state, reveals a new leak from Edward Snowden. GCHQ is fighting Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivists with DDoS attacks and malware. Continue reading
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‘Maybe we haven’t been clear enough about med records opt-out’, admits NHS data boss By Kelly Fiveash
NHS data chief Tim Kelsey admitted today that the health service had failed to adequately inform patients about how they can opt out of having their GP medical records shared throughout England. Continue reading
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Spy Agencies Work On Psychologically Profiling Everyone
Newly-released documents from Edward Snowden show that the NSA and other spy agencies are tracking people’s psychological and lifestyle traits such as sexual preference, extroversion-versus-introversion, and whether people are leaders or followers. Continue reading
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NHS: GP surgeries MUST DO BETTER on data handling, says ICO By Kelly Fiveash
A number of GP surgeries in England allowed their employees to have unrestricted internet access – thereby increasing the risk of data being leaked, hacked and targeted by viruses, Britain’s information watchdog warned today. Continue reading
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Sleepwalking into an information grab by private health? By Jane Fae
NHS England has still not done enough to inform patients of the privacy-busting implications of the new ‘care.data’ scheme, former home secretary David Davies tells openDemocracy. One of the most ambitious privacy-busting information grabs of the new century looks set to resume shortly. Following a minor reverse last year, the way is once more being… Continue reading
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Why you should be pissed off about Care.data By Alice
From the Spring, medical information about you which was previously only kept to help understand you as an individual – information from consultations, notes on prescriptions – will be uploaded to a central database to become one of the world’s most complete health databases. Our records are being connected to make them stronger. Continue reading
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American and British Spy Agencies Have INTENTIONALLY Weakened Security for Many Decades
Norway’s largest newspaper (Aftenposten) reports today that British spies pressured the developers of cellphone standards in the 1980s to intentionally weaken the cellphone’s encryption. In other words, hackers can break into cellphone calls much more easily because the British spies intentionally made the encryption 1,000 times weaker than it otherwise would have been. Continue reading
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NHS carelessly slings out care.data plans to 26.5 million Brits By Kelly Fiveash
NHS England has confirmed that the Better Information Means Better Care leaflet would be posted to 26.5 million household over the next four weeks. Patients who don’t want their medical records shared on Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s so-called care.data system are required to contact their GP surgery to opt out of that information being stored… Continue reading
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Edward Snowden: Power, Privacy and the Public Good By Colin Todhunter
Since 1993, Channel 4 in Britain has broadcast an ‘alternative’ Christmas message, sometimes humorous, at other times serious. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was given the opportunity to convey his message in 2008. This year, it was the turn of former National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Continue reading
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US: The Monitoring of Our Phone Calls? Government Spooks May Be Listening
The American government is in fact collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American. Continue reading
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An NSA Coworker Remembers The Real Edward Snowden: “A Genius Among Geniuses”
The black sweatshirt sold by the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation featured a parody of the National Security Agency’s logo, with the traditional key in an eagle’s claws replaced by a collection of AT&T cables, and eavesdropping headphones covering the menacing bird’s ears. Snowden wore it regularly to stay warm in the air-conditioned underground NSA… Continue reading
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Amnesty to sue UK intelligence over intercepted emails, phone calls
Human rights organization Amnesty International has declared it will take legal action against British security services. Amnesty claims its calls have been intercepted by UK intelligence agencies. The group has issued a claim at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) saying that the alleged actions by UK intelligence would be in breach of article 8 (right… Continue reading
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NSA gathering 5 billion records a day on cellphone locations around the world
The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with US intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. Continue reading
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What does the NHS’s new IT plan really want to extract from us? By Jane Fae Ozimek
The theory behind care.data is straightforward enough. Data from all (non-dissenting) UK patients is to be lodged in a central database, from where it may be used for admin purposes, for statistical analysis by the NHS or sold on to select research companies. Continue reading
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NSA hacked over 50,000 computer networks worldwide – report
The US National Security Agency hacked more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide installing malware designated for surveillance operations, Dutch newspaper NRC reports citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 