Latest scorecard from US Department of Education is out, and these are the figures for Maryland schools. I trust all of our CS majors know that they are expected to bring these figures up higher in the future, especially on the salary side.
The technology was developed and deployed under the justification that it was needed to protect national security and hunt terrorists. These intrusions on privacy are now being allowed for far more pedestrian needs. The linked article reports on how very routine and daily uses of surveillance technologies, with many of the examples arising just up the road from us in Baltimore.
At least that’s the answer in Maryland’s most affluent county, Montgomery, where 3 out of 4 high schoolers just failed the Algebra I final exam. That fail rate is actually down from last year, when 83 percent failed. (That time officials just spotted everyone a solid 15 points to get a few more of the students over the finish line.) The county’s action plan is: abandon holding final exams.
Most folks don’t know just how much information the government collects on them … all of it being coordinated by Obama officials charged with documenting inequities so their administrative actions can redirect wealth and privilege as they see fit.
Government documentation of police misconduct need not be disclosed to the public, says Maryland’s Court of Appeals, in a ruling that the state’s Public Information Act. The linked article describes the case, wherein an officer made disparaging comments about a person after he thought her answering machine had concluded recording his business message. Because of this ruling, the target of that inappropriate police behavior will not know what consequences – if any – befell the officer following her complaint.
Pro-Kremlin trolling on the internet seems to be a growth industry. We pay the price here.
… many of them state of Maryland employees who had to divulge personal data as a condition of getting affordable health insurance.
The banner news is that CareFirst, a large health insurer, suffered a data spill in June affecting over a million participants. The company claims that no SSNs were lost, nor insurance claims, but some who monitor these things are careful to note how the statement was parsed; the company did not speak to the administrative records of their participants, which now contain an immense amount of highly personal information.
In question is the integrity of data which are associated with wellness programs which are now increasingly mandated by employers – not least of which is the state Maryland. This year employees (many of them at University of Maryland on our campus) have been required to participate in these wellness programs, which entail disclosing personal medical information to people who are not your doctor, who later will determine what remedial ‘wellness’ activities you must engage in order to only pay normal health insurance rates. Those who do not disclose will pay penalty rates, which soon will skyrocket to thousands of dollars. It is a coercive and punitive system, which also indirectly transfers more costs to the participants in the long run. (Only the state will save – not the employees.)
Which brings us back to CareFirst. This insurer is one of the banner programs offered to us as employees, and it is known to be the most invasive in its questioning. “Are you happy at work?” “Do you like your boss?” “Do you feel you satisfy your partner?” “Do you keep guns in the home?” “Do you take recreational drugs?” “How much alcohol do you drink in a week?”
These questions sure seem pretty invasive. And their answers, from potentially thousands of Maryland employees who disclosed them under threat of state cost penalties, are now out on the internet and ready to be disclosed to the world.
John Deere is trying to convince the Copyright Office that farmers don’t really own the tractors they buy from them. They argue that the computer code that runs the systems is not for sale, and that purchasers of the hardware are simply receiving “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
This is a variation on the already long-running debate over whether automobile manufacturers have a lock on the firmware which drives their engines. Hobbyists know they can get far higher performance out of their rods by tweaking parameters and tailoring the control system to more specific needs. Of course, manufacturers are tuning their firmware for ’emissions control’ needs and other regulations. The upshot is that big corporations are rapidly making it illegal for people to manipulate goods that they own – err, or if you buy the corporate-speak, “license”.
Quoting Bloomberg Press:
Penn State University, which develops sensitive technology for the U.S. Navy, disclosed Friday that Chinese hackers have been sifting through the computers of its engineering school for more than two years.
Over five hundred partners in government and industry have been notified of the breach, and thousands of students are being notified that personal information (including social security numbers) has been carried off.
College Park officials should take this kind of news to heart when reflecting on the fact that we still haven’t fully repaired systems here following the prominent data breach over a year ago. Of course, for as close as we are with the Confucius Institute we’ve probably left things open to save them the bother of breaking in.
Though rebuffed before, DHS is coming back again for access to ALPRS databases — automated license plate reader system databases.
Their previous attempts to create a national database which tracks where everyone has been recorded as traveling were panned by privacy advocates. This time DHS declares this won’t be a problem, and so propose the standard dodge we’re surprised they did not use before – private tracking. Many things which are proscribed to Big Brother are perfectly legal if tracked and compiled commercially, never mind that government regulations are specifically crafted to enable select businesses to compile and immense amount of private data. Having enabled compilation of such data, the feds say “look, we didn’t compile anything”, and then simply purchase access to those databases. That is now what they propose for the license plate scanning tools, which don’t fall under any particular regulatory structure to limit how said data might be used at all.