A Santa Clara County resident infected with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis flew back to the United States earlier this month without alerting authorities of her illness - potentially threatening fellow passengers and people at Stanford Hospital’s emergency room with whom she came into contact.

Citing federal patient confidentiality rules, health authorities would not name the infected woman or the country she was visiting. A CDC spokeswoman said the agency was not yet ready to disclose the airline and flight she was on, where her flight originated or even what day she landed in San Francisco.

Let me see if I understand the facts:
1. A woman with multi-drug resistant TB has been roaming the world.
2. The disease difficult and expensive to treat and has a higher mortality rate than conventional TB.
3. The taxpayer’s employee says, “I’m not telling you the location of the danger.”

How many people must die before the privacy clause of HIPAA is repealed?
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The British gave America the basics of government and a history of societal organization dating to the Magna Carta. However, the United Kingdom has no equivalent of the US Bill of Rights. American concepts such a freedom of speech, freedom of state interference in religion, and rights to bear arms are unmatched in the island nation.

Despite the absence of these rights and many others, Brits have recently discovered their own Freedom of Information Act.

High trust societies are predicated on free flow of information between citizens, particularly regarding the performance of their government. Only an informed citizenry is equipped to embarrass and change the behavior of errant officials.

British citizens are still referred to as “subjects”, but at least now they are informed subjects.
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Friday the Sarasota Herald-Tribune published a searchable database from a nationwide list of 24,500 teachers who have been punished for a wide array of offenses. The SHT requested the information from the Florida Department of Education and then waited for years to gain access to the list.

The list was gathered and maintained by the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification. Roy Einreinhofer, NASDTEC’s executive director, opposed the newspaper’s decision to publish the information.

A nationwide Associated Press investigation earlier this year sought five years of state disciplinary actions against teachers and the reasons behind them. In the years the AP studied, 2001 to 2005, roughly one-quarter of all disciplinary actions against teachers involved sexual misconduct.
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Twenty patients of an oncology clinic in the Dallas area were sickened by medical syringes contaminated with bacteria. The bacterium, called Serratia marcescens, can cause fever and chills but generally responds to antibiotics.

Some of the Dallas-area patients became so ill after the bacterial exposure that they required hospitalization.

However, Texas Department of State Health Services spokesman, Doug McBride, declined to identify the contaminated clinic.

Let me see if I understand the facts:
1. A cancer clinic has been contaminated by bacteria.
2. The bacteria causes people to get sick enough to require hospitalization.
3. The taxpayer’s employee says, “I’m not telling you the location of the danger.”

Hmmmm. My first thought is Mr. McBride needs an employer who will fully appreciated his talents, like Health Director for Vladimir Putin.
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Pennsylvania legislative leaders have paid out-of-state companies $466,000 this year to conduct focus groups and public-opinion surveys. Even though the polls have been paid for by taxpayer dollars, the politicians have refused to release the results.

Politicians are afraid of only two things; being publically embarrassed and being voted out of office. Release of the polls might embarrass leaders either because polling was a waste of taxpayer money or because the results show significant citizen dissatisfaction.

Of course an embarrassed politician can be voted out of office.
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Should adult adoptees have access to their birth records and be able to learn the identity of their birth parents?

It is a question with two sides, that of the adoptee and that of the adoptee’s biological parents.

On one hand, every child seems to have an inner need to know from where they came.

On the other, an adoption agency promised a mother to keep her identity secret forever.

It would seem that the adoption agency should honor the mother’s desire for anonymity unless the mother reconsiders upon a request from the adoptee.
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Nearly two dozen North Texas cities have passed laws prohibiting sex offenders from living within 1,000 or 2,000 feet of schools, day-care centers, parks and other places frequented by children.

The attached Dallas Morning News story appears to argue that restricting the proximity of sex offenders to children doesn’t protect the little ones. To DMN writer Wendy Hundley, we modestly suggest that her children be offered as guinea pigs to test the hypothesis.

Offenders are probably cheap baby sitters and conveniently local. Just go to The Open Records Sex Offender Database to find one in your neighborhood.
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Marjorie Cohn, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, said that a Web site that publishes photos of convicted prostitutes violates the women’s right to privacy.

“It’s an incredible invasion of the privacy of the women, with no real benefit to law enforcement,” Cohn said.

Other than reducing the number of prositutes on the streets of El Cajon, there probably will be no benefit.

Cohn is a feminist law professor and criminal defense attorney. She joins the chorus of “privacy” advocates that find a right where none previously existed when it benefits their clients.

The criminal defense bar pounded The Open Records project when we first published the names, addresses, and photos of convicted sex offenders. We had violated their “right to privacy.”
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Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

After all what could be more upsetting than reading a report on safety problems? How upsetting is actually dying in an airplane collision?

The premise of Open Records is that information modifies behavior. People naturally avoid uncomfortable situations. Some FAA bureaucrats, airlines, or traffic controllers will probably be discomforted by disclosure of the safety deficiencies identified in the suppressed report.

Thanks to NASA, the bureaucrat’s comfort will be maintained, their behavior will likely remain unchanged, and the $8.5 million report paid for by citizens taxes will remain secret.
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Bridge inspection reports can legally remain secret, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office has decided.

Bridge maintenance is a life and death matter as so clearly proven by the recent I35 Minneapolis bridge collapse. In 1990, the Minneapolis bridge was inspected by the US Department of Transportation and found to be “structurally deficient.” In 2005, the Minneapolis bridge was again rated as “structurally deficient” and in possible need of replacement, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory database.

The bridge collapse August 1, 2007, killing 13 people.

Transparency into goverment activity creates peer pressure on government officials to do what they are elected to do, in this case fix broken down bridges.

By his ruling, AG Abbott has eliminated the peer pressure on the bureaucrats at the Texas Department of Transportation. In essence, he has told Texas to just trust the department to do the right thing.
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