Prescription Data Used To Assess Consumers
By Ellen Nakashima
Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool
for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit
report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on
more than 200 million Americans.
There is no right to privacy at international borders.
For those of us with laptops, this presents a pretty major problem: How
do we get through U.S. Customs with our beloved portable devices,
without having Uncle Sam peeking at every e-mail we've sent, every MP3
we've listened to, and every "home movie" we've made?
The obvious solution, encryption, is not enough. Non-Americans have
no right to enter the U.S. Don't want to hand over your encryption
keys? No problem--but you will be put on the next airplane back to your
home country (if you're lucky...If the government really doesn't like
you, you may end up getting sent to Syria).
Those of us "lucky" enough to have a U.S. passport may be forced to
enter the password for the data, if we want to avoid having the devices
seized and never returned.
For travelers heading to countries other than the U.S., it can be even worse. Refusing to hand over your encryption key to a lawful request by British Police can result in jail time. Ouch.
CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh posted a guide to securing laptops for border searches back in March. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jennifer Granick wrote a blog post on the subject recently,
in which she broke down the case law and offered a bit of advice. While
both of these are interesting reads, neither includes the practical
solution which I use.