Confidentiality and Privacy

Commonly people tell me that they think a large ‘space’ of their lives is ‘confidential’.  They have this Canadian delusional idea of ‘privacy’. The political immaturity of the average Canadian appears almost comical were it not such a reflection deep reflection of the powerful programming and propaganda of the Canadian ‘state’.
There is no ‘privacy’ or ‘confidentiality’ is a better truism than the assumption that there is any ‘confidentiality’ or ‘privacy’.  Canadians are commonly mislead by the television and journalism and the proximity to America where there are still vestiges of ‘confidentiality’ and ‘privacy’.  In Canada all confidentiality and privacy is relative.
Within my life time the law has changed diametrically to take all privacy and confidentiality.  If a judge requires anyone to share information then that information must be shared or the individual with the information faces incarceration, loss of income, public humiliation, and more.  This was not so 20 or 30 years ago.  The last battles for confidentiality were lost for individuals when both psychiatrists and priests were required to release information.  “Talk to the authorities’. The authority in Canada is supposedly the Parliament which writes laws and the Supreme Court which interprets laws and the police which uphold laws.  However the power of parliament has declined dramatically since Pierre Trudeau and the enactment of the beginning of the Legal Theocracy in which we live. The last dispute about who ruled Canada was the conflict a couple of years ago between the elected Prime Minister and the Appointed Supreme Court judge.  Democracy lost that dispute.  One of the final nails was hammered into the coffin.
In the day to day running of the country little has changed.  Tyranny is a sneaky business.  Unless their is a bloody revolution the process is quiet yet steady.  One day we woke up and had less freedom than we had the day before.
I see this in the world of information.
When I began as a psychiatrist I had only to write down ‘Anxiety’ or ‘Depression’.  I could keep ‘process notes’ regarding my patients but these were uninterpretable without my presence and explanation.  Then the ‘billing bodies’ without discussion with the patients and little if any discussion with doctors demanded that doctors ‘record’ much more detail.  If we didn’t record ‘detail’ then we’d not get paid.
Next the principal arm of State Control of Doctors, was the College of Physicians and Surgeons.  They introduced increasing ‘requirements’ for doctors regarding ‘note taking’.  Patients had no direct say in this and yet there was an ‘appointed’ representative to this ‘beurocratic body which itself was appointed by the Minister of Health who was supposedly ‘elected’ but never on a platform to ‘invade patient privacy’ or ‘destroy all manner of patient confidentiality’.  Despite this the State or government has stripped the patient of all previously held rights in this domain. The doctor patient ‘space’ is now populated heavily by members of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Ministry of Health, various patient advocacy groups, activists, countless insurance agents of varying training, records personnel often with no training in privacy and some who hardly speak English or French, some people very poorly paid indeed, and countless lawyers and their assistants.  I often find that this ’space’ has become so crowded that there really is no room for the patient or the doctor in this crowd of competing agendas.
Because health care has moved from a “private’ matter to a ‘public’ domain patients are called ‘customers’ by the ’State’ and the very ‘patient-doctor’ relationship is reduced to that of a person buying shoes.  There is no ‘covenant’ however the doctor can and will be held accountable to an impossible standard of perfection and every day knows that if he doesn’t stand with the masters against the patient he will lose his license or be faced with major financial punishment.
When patients see doctors and have private insurance companies they sign a ‘release of information’.  At this point they see what the Public Health Care system is doing all along.  The insurance company demands extensive information and all files of the visit and asks the doctors details that essentially are a request for an HD Video release of the patient doctor encounter.  Otherwise they won’t paid the poor and dependent patient the insurance they paid for.
What patients don’t realize is that 25 years ago insurers essentially asked. Is the patient sick?  Is it Anxiety or Depression?  When can they return to work?   What was said between doctor and patient was not considered their ‘business’.  Now if I do a rectal examination, the insurance company wants a sample of the stool or at least a report of that stool sample.  They want to know everything the patient says.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons treats the doctors like criminals. All doctors are guilty until proven innocent. The Minister of Health and all the activist organizations making millions parasitically off the doctor patient relationship have in their minds justified their largesse on the basis of their protecting the patient usually from sex with the doctor, which is actually an incredibly rare phenomena.  This ‘ends against the middle’ illogical rhetorical position has justified the invasion of the ‘doctor patient’ space to the point where neither the doctor or patient have any actual ‘control’ over ‘privacy’ or ‘confidentiality’.
When I began working as a physician, the College of Physicians and Surgeons was a licensing body which had no more actual power than the ‘driver license’ bodies.  The question was ‘were you fit to drive?” For doctors this was ‘the license credentials’.  If the police caught you being a danger to yourself or others driving your license could be revoked.  There wasn’t a whole lot more that was involved.  Though today even that body is using the ‘insurance’ and ‘prevention’ model to invade every car much like they have in medicine.  It wasn’t always thus.
Then a judge said , “if it wasn’t written down it didn’t occur’.  And the College of Physicians and Surgeons essentially  began to create a ‘patient as the enemy’ model for doctors to follow.  The doctors own insurance lawyers then told doctors that ‘for every five minutes with the patients they had to chart five minutes’.  Psychiatrists were actually encouraged to have cameras and recording devices in the office because the ‘doctor’ was called a liar and a killer by the ‘activists’.
This pattern occurred in medicine. it  has occurred in every other area of the individual’s life.
With computerization all information is readily accessible.
When I ‘hacked’ in the 80’s it was a relatively easy matter. All one had to get was the phone number of the data entry connection of any institution.  There were no firewalls. There were no laws against the phone numbers . All one needed was a modem and software.  All government and hospital agencies files were readily available to a person with a PC.  Today there is minimum of state information protection yet my friends in ‘software security’ tell me it’s nothing. They being smart young geeks find all the ‘government’ security measures outside very limited areas ‘laughable’.
Now the supposedly most protected area of information of Canadians is our ‘income tax’ data.  The income tax data however may be viewed by hundreds of people and many agencies outside the Revenue Canada Agency (Canda’s equivalent of the IRA” .  The whole portions of the  countries income tax files have gone missing at times.  The information has ended up getting lost and showing up in wide open services repeatedly.  Besides of of Canada’s security has on several occasions been totally hacked by Chinese military.  Their concern for the confidentiality of our individual medical, legal, financial data that is in government computer banks is little if none as they have no concern for their own country men.  So this information is potentially all over the web.  It is more reasonable to ‘assume’ that every piece of computerized information that government has ever collected on you or any information you have ever given to a doctor, dentist, lawyer, bank is available to an interested person.
I became aware of how little privacy I had in my divorce.  Information that was ‘sacrosanct’ to me was publicly distributed.  There was no relevance to the divorce process but it’s release was personally damaging and the motive was simply ‘spite’.  In contrast given the amount of money to be made from ‘identity theft’ extortion or a wide variety of other ‘information’ abuses it was a really minor thing at the time.  It did tweet my interest even more in the issue of ‘confidentiality’ and ‘privacy’.
To anyone interested , the choice of judges in the US is an education in privacy and confidentiality.  A judge’s computerized ‘video’ selection showing he’d ordered’ Debbie Does Dallas’ or some such ‘soft porn’ caused him to be passed over for the position. it was not even certain that he rather than someone else in the household had used his credit information. But given the now ancient understanding of ‘privacy’ he was ‘assumed’ a pervert.
CSI Cyber is a good television show if only because it shows each episode the ‘limits of technology’ which everyone increasingly uses but no one it appears ‘understands’.
My latest iPhone was chalk full of spy ware.  I can’t buy a computer related device now that isn’t ‘spy wear’. My internet history is recorded everywhere. In the past a ‘private eye’ had to go through my garbage outside my door to get to know my ‘habits’ but today the amount of time i spend watching CSI cyber is available to any mildly internet savey person.  I have ordered on line ’spy ware’ ’search’ programs that make anyone a private eye.  This is ‘public ware’.  It’s not any of the specialized expensive software.

I have a few friends who live ‘off the grid’ though this is increasingly difficult because there are increasing laws against this.
The latest ‘long census’ is a move back to the detailed ‘collection  of data on citizens.  It’s antiquated but it’s more ‘invasion of privacy’ at the group level.
A black homeless man told me that ‘we don’t know anything about the rich crackers because they pay millions for security and live hidden lives behind closed doors.  We can’t even get inside. We live on the street so the social workers and police know everything about us.  When Harry tried to fuck a dog last week everyone knew.  But we don’t know anything about those rich crackers so I figure they have all that security because they are all fucking their dogs up in those mansions and when they’re not they’re fucking somebody’s children.  I am not. But nobody cares about me.  That’s the only privacy I have.  I’m nobody."
It got me thinking.
So I’ve begun to live ’transparently’.  My divorce got me started. Prior to that I thought there was some vestiges of privacy in the world but when I watched the courts and government in that process I learned that there’s only lies.  The psychopaths, sociopaths and pedophiles live in the dark.
I’m happy to live in the light. People know I masturbate. People know my real income is. People know I’m not rich but that those who are rich own major buildings and planes in fleets and can hire people to hide anything in their past.  It’s even possible to get rid of a criminal record.  Not completely.  But if a person doesn’t have the funds to search a simple name change or geographical move can complicate findings .  Identity is a whole other matter.
Anyway the reason I write this blog is about this ‘idea of transparency’.  My friends know I wouldn’t steal, rape, torture or lie, not that I couldn’t but that if I did there’d have to be millions of dollars involved.  I’m on record as saying that I understand doctors who take money like escorts but I don’t think it’s good for the profession if doctors sell out like cheap street whores.  We know a lawyer can be bought and so can an accountant.  It’s assumed that every politician has a price and most are low.  Businessmen will do most anything for money.
Ralf Nader was an interesting fellow. Millions of dollar were given to private investigators to ‘find’ ‘dirt’ on him and none did. He’s apparently the most boring man in America.

Which is what the conclusion is. No one but a very very few boring or extremely rich people can be in public today because of the grossly outdated ideas of ‘privacy’ and ‘confidentiality’ .  Everyone has a cameo and everyone has a computer so it follows that as everyone masturbates at some point in their lives except maybe 1 % everyone is going to have a picture of themselves doing something sexual or deceitful or bad or ugly at some time in their lives.  There is not a young person today who is going to be able to ‘elected’ because of the loss of ‘privacy’ .
It’s become a liars world. Unless we assume ’transparency’.  But even ’transparency’ is rife with ti’s own new set of problems.  But anyone who thinks there’ s privacy or confidentiality is watching too much television and not at all aware of the times.
As for the law. I spent thousands of dollars on the most advanced encryption and computer privacy enrichment only to have a girl helping in my office steal my password over my shoulder reading upside down and bypassing thousands of dollars of encryption.  When I reported this to the police there was absolutely on consequences for ‘information theft’ even when they were caught red handed. I was actually told the police assumed it happened all the time but that I was the only one who had reported it  The ‘lesson’ in this matter cost me a hundred thousand dollars.  The message was the no-one cares and even when you catch a thief red handed there are no consequences because ‘privacy’ and ‘confidentiality’ are a lie.
To be a ‘free man’ in Canada today I have to accept that the STATE and every other agency is ‘free’ to enter my space and that those who were supposed to protect me are the most likely to profit from betraying me.
The old way is dead so there’s need for a new system or for people just to learn to walk about naked knowing that those who are clothed are more likely lizards than human.