Sheriffs in North Carolina are demanding access to state computer records identifying anyone in the state with prescriptions for powerful painkillers and other controlled substances. The obvious intrusion into the privacy of citizens is being justified as potentially allowing police to make more drug arrests.
The dragnet would pull in thirty percent of the citizens who have at least one prescription for a controlled substance. That is nearly 2.5 million people.
Such a proposal should result in public outcry and recrimination. However, the legislature is considering the request.
It is astonishing that we have come to a point where such a demand is considered plausible. We are quickly turning into a fishbowl society where every aspect of our lives remain under government surveillance and monitoring. This is a change in our country, which is based, as stated by Louis Brandeis, “the right to be left alone.” There are any number of things that can make it easier for the government including total access to financial and medical records as well as discretionary searches and seizures. Privacy often loses when “balanced” against claims of crime fighting. As citizens become more accustomed to government intrusion, it makes further intrusions possible. The Katz test premises the right of the government to engage in warrantless surveillance on the “reasonable expectation of privacy of citizens.” As those expectations fall, the power of the government increases — creating a downward spiral.
Privacy remains an abstraction that fades away in the presence of “tough on crime” rhetoric. What concerns me is that an association of sheriffs would have so little appreciation for core privacy values and traditions. As Brandeis observed in his dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928):
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Source: News Observer
Jonathan Turley
Anonymously Yours
I have an interesting question and hopefully someone can answer it. Walt Disney, had a mustache, right? How come the Walt Disney Company will not hire anyone with facial hair? Query me that one?
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Lice?
Buddha: Cool. I hope the challenge would fly. As both a physician and (sometimes) a patient, I think the loopholes in HIPAA are big enough to drive a mack truck through.
i’ve lived 100mi from disney world for almost to 20 years and have never been there. can’t say i feel deprived either.
“How come the Walt Disney Company will not hire anyone with facial hair?”
What is “Because fascists are really good at the whole ‘do as I say, not as I do’ philosophy.”
I’ll take “Highly Overrated Americans” again for $500, Alex.
Pete,
I may bullshit about a lot of things, but one thing I will not bullshit about is lame brain ideals that have made military contractors wealthy….
I have an interesting question and hopefully someone can answer it. Walt Disney, had a mustache, right? How come the Walt Disney Company will not hire anyone with facial hair? Query me that one?
the Country is off its nut…if our ‘leaders’ keep entertaining this anti-people garbage it is going to make all the wrong people nervous….
F*ck
George,
What can I say. I have a fondness for the classics.
A Fourth Amendment argument, Buddha? How retro of you. That hasn’t been the law of the land in years. 😉
AY
i had to read up on the sticky hand grenade. i can just imagine the first test, HEY, WAIT I’VE FOUND A PROB…
What sheriffs in North Carolina are attempting to do will be institutionalized as the new national health care bill is implemented. We can be sure that medical records – including prescription information – will be widely available to government employees as well as the fortune 500 set despite current assurances to the contrary.
The reason sheriffs would have a particular fondness for access to prescription drug databases today is due to the laws allowing law enforcement to seize cash and property associated with these so-called crimes.
Last year I talked about our vanishing privacy:
Should be “2000” above, sorry.
Byron,
“And Falls Church VA put a gps tracking device on a car without a warrent.
The police state is upon us and growing.”
_________
It’s already here, we’re just watching it’s refinement waiting to see where the citizen push-back (if any) comes from. I believe that. I no longer believe we have a Constitutional Democracy and with easily hackable, unverifiable electronic voting machines I don’t think it’s even a democracy. I think the 200 election closed the door on that conceit.
It would be interesting to know if N.C. has confiscation laws, does the state get to confiscate the property of drug felons? Maybe the state (and the police who undoubtedly get a cut) has maxed out other drug profit taking and is looking to expand its profit venue. I would not doubt it for a minute. It is entirely consistent with the ‘government as a business’ model being pushed by the wingers and entirely in tune with the corporate model we see at work around us and pervading every aspect of our lives. With states in the financial straights they are currently this may be nothing more than opening a new revenue stream.
The bottom line is always the bottom line.
I listen to right wing talk radio (being a conservative of sorts) and I am seriously worried that they are whipping the country into a frenzy of anti-Islamic sentiment. It is very troubling, nothing good is going to come from anti-Islamic rhetoric. I have Muslim friends and I am actually worried for their safety.
I find myself turning it off more and more, I am embarrassed by these people. I don’t say this lightly either.
Dredd,
To which the counter would be that absent compelling proof of specific wrongdoing, the state law fails for being unconstitutionally vague and tantamount to a fishing expedition by law enforcement across the body of patients within the state in toto that usurps each individual patients 4th Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. What starts as a HIPPA challenge could end up being a Constitutional challenge. Of course, you could open with the 4th Amendment and cut to the chase as well. But whatever opens the door to court scrutiny is good with me.
Buddha: I’m not sure a HIPAA challenge would fly. There’s a clause in there which states, “Covered entities may use and disclose protected health information without individual authorization as required by law (including by statute, regulation, or court orders).”
Basically, privacy is protected by law… until they say it isn’t.
Mike S.,
Did not DuPont also want some of the action as well. Something about nylon roping and the Navy…the service people that actually used the rope hated it because the salt water rotted it quicker. I think it was much broader than Hearst but he had the ability to get the good word out…..this was also about the time that they made the sticky hand grenades..they worked wonders in blowing things up, the only problem was getting them out of your hand. This brilliant ideal did not last too long.
All the worst repression is perpetrated in the service of some supposed “greater good.” Obscenity Laws, Drug Laws, Immigration Laws, Terrorism Lawa are put in place to protect us from ourselves, or from a manufactured “bogey man” that purportedly will destroy society as we know it. All of the great tyrants in history have used unreasoned fear to solidify their control.
When it comes to the “War on Drugs” its’ history lies in the repeal of prohibition in the 30’s and the fear of job loss by a man named Harry J. Anslinger, who convinced people that marijuana and hemp were threatening our youth with degradation. He was nobly aided by W.R. Hearst who fear that hemp-based paper would make his vast ownership of wood forests valueless. In any event it made good copy for his tabloids. Good old Hollywood was enlisted, as were radio and crime fiction.
Forgotten in all this was that heroin was developed in the 1910’s as a cure for the “morphine scourge” sweeping the nation.
Curiously, those to be most feared represented the lower, or darker classes, who were waiting to “prey upon” the pristine white population. Of course forgotten in all this was that we gave our aircraft crews “speed” to help them stay awake.
It is estimated that about 60 to 80% of our “noble” cowboys and western settlers were serious alcoholics. Today of course they are held up as the apotheosis of the America Dream of the rugged individual.
As others here have cogently stated in rounding out our picture of this, we are merely seeing the expansion of a Police State in the US that will shortly rival the KGB and behave little differently.
Mike A:
let us repeal the Patriot Act and quickly. I would like to see “reefer” legalized as well, I can turn my 1 acre into some green cash. I wonder how hard it is to grow cannabis? And the yield per acre.
This abomination is the illegitimate offspring of “Reefer Madness” and the Patriot Act. Since we have established a doctrine of constitutional immunity for the actions of the federal executive branch, it is only natural that the states will wish to adopt the same standards.