Vogel Internet, Information Technology and e-Discovery Blog : Texas Internet, Information Technology, eCommerce & E-Discovery Lawyer & Attorney Peter S. Vogel : Gardere Wynne Sewell Law Firm : Dallas TX

A report that the National Security Agency (NSA) exceeded its authority by intercepting emails and phone calls of Americans make some people feel safer, and others wary. Many speculate that these massive email and phone call interceptions are systematic and intentional. For instance the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have been following NSA’s activities for some time and are alarmed at NSA’s actions.

US Patriot Act

In the wake of September 11 terrorist attacks on October 26, 2001 President Bush signed the US Patriot Act after passing both houses of Congress in less than one day. The US Patriot Act gave the federal government unparalleled power to search emails and private communications without many checks and balances in the name of protection from terrorists. The US Patriot Act was renewed in 2005 substantially without major change. Congress and US citizens want certain protections, but EPIC and EFF are concerned that the US Patriot Act is too broad.

Increased in Criminal Data Breaches

Reports that there have been a significant increase in data breaches by organized crime is hardly surprise, but it seems that NSA’s efforts in searching emails and phone calls have not really paid off to make our Internet a safer place in which to conduct business. Last year there were more than 100 confirmed data breaches involving roughly 285 million consumer records, most of which occurred from sites overseas. There needs to be a balance between safety from bad guys and protection of civil liberties.
 

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Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s General Counsel, reported the governance vote results that 74.37% of the 665,654 cast ballots in support of the new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Principles (Statement). The new Statement was adopted with less far than 1% even of Facebook friends casting ballots. It’s refreshing that there was a democratic vote on the largest social network in the world, but amazing that so few voted.

Statement Requires 30% to Vote

Well that was the plan, but with such a small turn out Facebook decided that the 30% cannot even be the threshold. Facebook will go back to the drawing board to determine what percentage should be the minimum, and it will be a low percentage.

Democracy Web 2.0 Style

The reason for the governance vote to begin with was that Facebook was changing policies only to get Facebook friends vocal pushback. Facebook provided democracy by allowing the New Statement to be vetted in virtual town hall forums and a vote of the friends. As the Internet evolves in the future perhaps we can look back at this governance vote as a sea change that social network users should have a say in the governance. However, since so few individuals ever read terms of service or privacy policies this may also be the only vote ever conducted on social networking governance.

What do you think?
 

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From April 16 through 23, 2009 the 200 million Facebook users have a chance to vote on their own governance, but the new governance will only be adopted if 30% of the Facebooks friends vote. This vote follows a virtual town hall meeting that allowed comments on the proposed governance terms. It seems to make sense that the users should have some control over their own social networking activities.

Friends Complain

Hundreds of thousands Facebook friends sent emails complaining about a new privacy policy in September 2006, and as a result Facebook decided not to adopt the new privacy policy. Earlier this year Facebook decided to retain all items posted forever, and another ground swell of opposition stopped these changes. These messages indicate a sense of ownership that Facebook users have about Facebook, which led Facebook to promise to be more transparent, and as a result the right to vote on governance.

All Facebook Users Should Review the Proposed Governance

Since few individuals ever bother to read terms of use, privacy policies, or click agreements, this is a novel opportunity for Web 2.0 to encourage the users to establish policies. This may have an impact on future policies for the Internet, so stay tuned for the election results.
 

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Merely spending $19B to spur the use of electronic health records (EHR) does not guarantee that the plan will succeed. A study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports that only 9% of the US hospitals have EHRs. As well, the American Medical Information Association reports that there is need for about 70,000 medical informaticians who are trained in medical records and claims, and clinical care. It seems unlikely that EHR will succeed without properly trained individuals since they are critical to the success of implementing EHRs.

Big Divide

With only 9% of the US hospitals who actually have EHRs that means millions of people in rural US are currently “have nots.” However no question that there are many hospitals implementing EHRs since there are major medical systems from EPIC Systems, Eclipsys, Cerner, GE Healthcare, McKesson, and Siemens AG being implemented throughout the US. These various medical systems provide EHR for millions of patients. For example Epic claims to have 175 customers representing about 22% of the US population, approximately 70 million patients. So clearly there are a significant number of patients who either have EHRs now, or will soon.

HIPAA Connection

I have never been a big fan of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) given the cost and benefit to patients. It seems pretty clear that the 18 elements protected by HIPAA are easily available from various sources on the Internet. It’s not hard to find home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, birth dates, email addresses, to name a few. It’s not clear how much money was spent on HIPAA, and to what end? Medical care providers spent a fortune, and many vendors profited, but it’s not clear that medical privacy is any better today than it was when HIPAA was created in 1996. Without question the growth of the Internet has made personal information a greater challenge to protect.

So it seems highly unlikely that just spending $19B will ensure that EHRs will be a success.
 

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Speculation that Wikipedia has run out of ideas is an amusing headline. It’s hard to believe that in 8 years Wikipedia has more than 2.8 million English articles since the Encyclopedia Britannica started in 1768 and has about 250,000 articles. Wikipedia’s growth is quite astonishing since in March 2006 (three years ago) the 1 millionth English article milestone was reached! Today Wikipedia has more than 75,000 active contributors who write the articles in 260 languages with more than 684 million visitors a year. Because of Wikipedia’s dominating success, even Microsoft just announced it is withdrawing its encyclopedia Encarta (with 42,000 articles).

What’s a Wiki to Begin With?

As recently as yesterday an experienced business person asked what the heck a wiki was anyway. Wiki is Hawaiian for “quick,” and the wiki concept is part of the Internet web 2.0 (my 5th Big Bang of the Internet) for content collaboration.  IBM and Microsoft (and many other companies) have thousands of wikis they use for the development of new technologies. That is, developers on new projects use wikis as a tool to contribute ideas and edit content. These private wikis allow teams within companies to work together to solve problems, but a public wiki is different.

Wikimedia Is More than an Encyclopedia

Wikipedia is a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit Internet encyclopedia and also has sister projects hosted through Wikimedia Foundation which includes among these services: Wikiquote (Collection of quotations), Wikispecies (Directory of species), Wikinews (Free-content news), Wikibooks (Free textbooks and manuals), Wikiversity (Free learning materials and activities), Wikitionary (Dicitionary and thesaurus), and Wikisource (Free-content library).

Wiki Legal Issues

Who owns wiki articles and the content makes is interesting. Clearly contributors to internal private company wikis expect the content owned by the companies. However if an employer fails to establish contractual terms with their employees about ownership, it becomes less clear about who owns the content in a wiki. On the other hand, when individuals post on public wikis such as Wikipedia they are contributing all intellectual property to the wiki (under the terms of service) and all Wikimedia materials are available under the GNU Free Documentation License (Open Source). To make things more interesting Wikipedia expressly disclaims the validity of it content. Yet millions of people around the world rely on Wikipedia as authority, when the articles are just a collaborative encyclopedia that may be changed or edited at any moment. As the Internet evolves clearly the sharing of information in wikis will continue to affect the future of information available.
 

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