Kaiser Notice of Legal Action
This evening Kaiser lawyers sent me notice of a March 16 hearing for a restraining order. At least I think that's what it is. I received the notice via tonight at 6:00pm.

I'm confused about several aspects of this notice. First, it's not clear whether I'm required to show up at the hearing or not. Second, the notice says I'm supposed to respond to Kaiser's attorneys tonight if I "plan to oppose". Note I received the notice at 6:00pm, so the timeframe is very short.

It seems to me that if I planned to show up for a hearing, I should be informing the court, not contacting Kaiser attorneys. The short timeframe makes me think the attorneys are trying to trick me into calling them so they can intimidate me. On the other hand, I don't want to miss anything I'm actually supposed to do for the court.

If there is an attorney out there who would like to represent me, now would be a good time to speak up.

Sigh. Looks like I have a long night of research into legalese ahead.


Update: Finally a blogger recognizes the real issue: The lesson here is that if you discover that your company negligently exposes personal customer information, YOU will be attacked for exposing their mistakes!

http://www.freedomisslavery.info/index.php?cat=5

One of the reporters I talked to today even asked why I kept posting the evidence when it would just get me in more and more trouble. I keep asking why isn't Kaiser in trouble? This is baffling me. I get the point that no one cares about all the crap Kaiser put me through personally, but why aren't the 140 people who have now been informed that their medical information was posted online demanding to know who posted it in the first place and why Kaiser didn't give them the courtesy of calling them when the Systems Diagrams were quietly removed - after being online for over a year. I don't think people realize that if these were training documents for offsite (and possibly non-U.S.) consultants, as I believe they were, then the trainees all read these documents. They may have even printed them out for training binders.

And Kaiser has been trying to convince Congress that they should take a leading role in the development of a national Electronic Medical Record (or at least they should should get to profit from re-selling the one they have packaged with Kaiser's own population management data). In my opinion, distributing diagrams of systems that partly constitute California's transitional EMR is an even bigger deal than the patient privacy issue. No one has been thinking about this at all. The federal government is in all likelyhood going to hand Kaiser all sorts of money to make a show of investing in EMR, and the money is going to go to a profoundly sloppy organization that lets part of their Intranet leak online to be indexed by Google and allows either employees or consultants in highly sensitive areas post system specs on a public web site! The federal government needs to start asking questions about whether Kaiser can back up its promises when they start bidding for EMR projects.

I'm sure Kaiser will end up with their restraining order, and when they do corporate power will prevail over the truth. Right now people can see for themselves if Kaiser's claim that 140 patients is true. I maintain Kaiser has inflated the figure so they can get the public and the media to help them stomp on a thorn in their side: a thorn they created through their own unethical behavior. Right now, even with the evidence still available, journalists have just been reprinting Kaiser's claims without verifying them. I bet the minute the System Diagrams are safely hidden away, Kaiser will start inventing details that will paint me as a Very Scary Person.