The Freedom Bulletin

In addition to health insurance companies invading their customers’ privacy as I blogged about earlier in the week, there seems to be a similar trend with car insurance. As opposed to simply trusting customers to report their driving habits, car insurance companies are starting to place surveillance devices in cars to record this information directly. No one (yet) is required to submit to this invasion of privacy in order to buy car insurance, but companies are offering discounts to those who do.

For example, beginning in 2009, Progressive rolled out a program called MyRate, which uses an in-car telematic device that collects data about driving speed, acceleration and deceleration, distance, and time of day, enabling customers to receive discounts based on what the data show. If you live in MA, you have likely seen TV ads for its successor, Snapshot, which debuted in 2010 and operates the same way. Similar programs in other states include DriveWise by Allstate and Drive Safe and Save by State Farm. Other programs use GPS to track location. More and more insurance companies are expected to start similar programs in the coming years.

Surveys have shown that many people are disturbingly willing to sacrifice their privacy rights to save money. According to one poll by CarInsurance.com, 64% of people would allow a breathalyzer in their cars, 38% would accept a data-monitoring device like those described above, 37% would accept a cellphone-disabling device, and 20% would accept an in-car surveillance camera.

Some might argue that there’s nothing wrong with giving people the option of sacrificing some privacy for a cheaper rate, but as I wrote in my earlier blog post on health insurance, rewarding people for giving up privacy is the same as punishing people for keeping their privacy. And the punishment could become more ominous in the future. In an interview with the New York Times, Shamik Lala of the consulting firm A.T. Kearney predicted that the insurance industry will view privacy-free policies as standard in five years, and people who wish to keep their privacy will be viewed as risky drivers. We should fight back against the increasing surveillance of our lives. Privacy is a fundamental right, and people shouldn’t be financially penalized for exercising it.

CVS recently unveiled a new policy requiring all employees who use the company’s health insurance plan to undergo a medical screening by May 1 of this year, which includes having their height, weight, and blood pressure measured by a doctor, as well as blood tests for glucose and cholesterol, or else be penalized $50 a month. Employees must sign a statement certifying that the screening is “voluntary,” and the results will be sent to WebMD Health Services Group, the company that implements CVS’s benefit programs.

This policy has deservedly faced criticism from privacy rights organizations. Dr. Deborah Peel, the founder of Patient Privacy Rights, called the policy “incredibly coercive and invasive.”

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In the wake of the scandal about Harvard students who allegedly cheated on their take-home final exams, a rather disturbing fact has now been widely reported by local media…at least disturbing to people who care about privacy. Harvard searched the email accounts of its 16 Resident Deans to investigate who had leaked information about the alleged cheating to the press. They only looked at the subject lines of emails, as opposed to their contents, and they searched the deans’ administrative accounts, as opposed to their individual Harvard accounts. But still, this is an invasion of privacy, and deans say that they feel shocked, dismayed, betrayed, and creeped out. Although Harvard has a policy that requires it to notify faculty members before or shortly after any searches take place, the university did not make the deans aware of the searches until the Boston Globe started investigating the matter nearly 6 months later.

Some people have criticized these reactions; for example, Eileen McNamara at WBUR calls this a case of “selective outrage” because, she claims, faculty members wouldn’t have been upset if Harvard had snooped on regular employees. (Harvard faculty are given greater email privacy protections than staff, and it is debatable which category deans are considered to fall under.) While I don’t think it’s right to criticize people for being upset about a violation of their privacy – the deans have a right to be upset, and their colleagues have a right to be upset on their behalf – she makes a good point that it is always a bad thing for liberty and privacy when companies and organizations look through the emails of their employees. In Boston.com’s On Liberty blog, Gavi Wolfe of the ACLU and Kade Crockford of the Technology for Liberty project use this incident to draw attention to the Electronic Privacy Act, a law that would require law enforcement to actually have probable cause in order to access logs of people’s phone use, contacts, location, emails, and texts. Unfortunately from a privacy rights point of view, courts have granted employers pretty much free reign to monitor their employees’ use of work email accounts and computers. But that doesn’t mean the government should have free reign as well. A law like the Electronic Privacy Act is long overdue.

On Friday, I read some of the most beautiful words in the English language, words that I never thought would be true: “some airports that now have backscatter scanners will go back to having metal detectors.”

As I reported in 2011, the TSA has been altering its millimeter wave scanners – what I call its naked machines – so that they no longer show images of people’s nude bodies under their clothes. Instead they show a generic outline, with either the word “OK,” or any suspicious findings flagged. Congress ordered that all scanners convert to the non-naked version by June.

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This post is part of a series to help raise awareness of Gun Appreciation Day. Please visit the Gun Appreciation Day official site to learn more, and continue to visit The Freedom Bulletin for new posts about gun rights and the Second Amendment each day until January 19. 

This past week, I saw an article in my local paper, the Melrose Free Press, about local politicians and their views on gun control, and I thought I would give my opinion on what they said. Here is an excerpt of the article, involving State Sen. Katherine Clark, State Rep. David Linsky, and State Rep. Paul Brodeur:

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This post is part of a series to help raise awareness of Gun Appreciation Day. Please visit the Gun Appreciation Day official site to learn more, and continue to visit The Freedom Bulletin for new posts about gun rights and the Second Amendment each day until January 19. 

In addition to gun control, which I strongly believe is the wrong solution to acts of violence like the Newtown school shooting, another topic that has been discussed a great deal lately is mental health.

For example, in a blog post entitled “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” which went viral immediately after the shooting, Liza Long wrote about a huge fight that she had with her 13-year-old son after she forced him to change his pants to comply with his school’s uniform policy, eventually resulting in her bringing him to a mental hospital. “It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health,” she writes.

Countless people have advocated that the Newtown tragedy could have been prevented by increased mental health screenings and mental health treatment. For example, David Brooks at the New York Times blames violence on America’s “mobile, spread out, atomized society” and the “under-institutionalized space” that people inhabit after finishing school and before getting married, having children, or choosing permanent careers. He says that we need to “look for gaps in our mental health treatment system,” “recommend ways to fill them,” and “give parents with violent children an easier path into the counseling system.” Joe Nocera at the same publication bemoans the fact that people with mental illnesses are “allowed to go about their business unfettered.” He calls it a “delusion” that “the sickest among us should always be in control of their own treatment.” The Wall Street Journal, usually at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum as the Times, agrees with this idea, urging society to “modernize mental health law,” calling it a “catastrophe” for people to be released from psychiatric hospitals and allowed to live with “few medical or cultural guardrails,” and praising a Connecticut bill that “would give the state the authority to forcibly medicate and stabilize people.” Some people have advocated policies such as Laura’s Law, a California law that requires outpatient mental health treatment, upon the request of police, mental health professionals, spouses, or family members, for people a judge deems likely to become dangerous to themselves or others.

But in my opinion, this is not the solution. Requiring a person to undergo medical procedures or take medication against their will is a violation of individual liberty and dignity. To create a more communal, institutionalized society is a disservice to people who are happier with independence, solitude, and individual choice. And for the government and society to further scrutinize people in an attempt to detect any possible abnormality is an unacceptable invasion of privacy. As one person who was forcibly “treated” under Laura’s Law said, “They gave me a catheter and strapped me down naked to the hospital bed and then sedated me. They strip you of all your rights. I just don’t see how they expect to logically assume that treating people with violence is going to cure violence.” And Eduardo Vega, director of San Francisco’s Mental Health Association, pointed out another downside to mental health coercion: “There’s so many people who, precisely because they’re afraid of things like coercion, things like being locked up, being labeled, they don’t receive any services.”

There is a way that society could work together to decrease the odds of mass shootings and other violent crimes occurring, and this solution does have to do with mental health… but in the opposite way as most people are suggesting.

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On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia ruled that a Texas school could suspend 15-year-old student Andrea Hernandez for refusing to participate in a program that tracks students’ whereabouts through RFID-enabled chips in their ID badges. Seems like a violation of freedom and privacy, right? The program itself certainly is, in my opinion, as I explained in a blog post back in November. But as Kashmir Hill at Forbes points out in an article entitled, ”Court Rejecting Texas Student’s Opposition To RFID Tracker Not As Outrageous As It Seems,” the school offered to let Andrea wear a badge that was identical in appearance to the other students’ but did not contain a chip. Andrea, her father, and her lawyer were not satisfied with this solution, however, because wearing what appears to be a tracking badge would give the impression that she supported the program.

Although the judge’s decision is not as unreasonable as it appears at first glance, it leaves unanswered the important question of whether  school tracking programs should exist in the first place. The chips reportedly only track students’ locations when they are at school, and their purpose is to make sure students aren’t hanging out in the halls or bathrooms when they are supposed to be in class (the district says it was losing out on funds, which are allotted based on how many students are in classrooms at the start of the day). But in my opinion, the desire for more funding does not trump individuals’ interest in privacy. To track the whereabouts of all students, even if it is only during the school day, punishes everyone for the actions of those few who cut class. Unfortunately, we live in a world where privacy is being continually eroded by surveillance cameras, cell phones, online advertising companies, search engines…you name it. Schools should be teaching kids to fight back against this trend; the last thing they should be doing is reducing privacy even more. As Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, said, “We don’t want to see this kind of intrusive surveillance infrastructure gain inroads into our culture. We should not be teaching our children to accept such an intrusive surveillance technology.”