The judge has no discernible argument with the constitution. This is not a constitutional issue for this judge. It's an issue of disturbance of judicial naps. With this non-result, the status quo is preserved and nobody cares. Hands washed, back to sleep.
By the time there's an appeal, the question will be moot for 2016. If someone actually gets arrested for it in the meantime, they can be the plaintiff and own the problem on a different lawsuit and the judge gets to dodge entirely.
So in exchange for crippling a feature - AutoHop for recently broadcast content - that I neither use nor care about, I get another feature - Sling TV - that I will neither use nor care about. What could be better?
Given that the first two brief statements in that press release were from the County Executive and the County Council President, and that he is specifically called out as a mere "County Council Member", I'm betting that there was a meeting where the adults in the room explained reality to him.
Which doesn't change the fact that he did make a real apology, but I don't think it got as far as his lawyer.
HIPAA doesn't sanction all disclosure of Protected Healthcare Information (PHI). It sanctions disclosure of PHI from covered entities, which include people and organizations that practice medicine or provide administrative support to those who do. If you want to make a HIPAA claim against Roca, you'd have to establish that they were indeed a covered entity, which is a challenge when you're talking about simply selling a product on the Internet, even when that product purports to have pharmaceutical effect.
Where Roca might be in more trouble is that they claim to be providing medical consultation services, which absolutely does make them a covered entity for those services. That might be fun. The Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights(OCR) pursues HIPAA claims, and they can be decidedly nasty at times.
The FDA is implicated also. While I suspect they're hiding behind the "nutritional supplements" exemption, Roca is pretty clearly selling a product which is by its simple description a medical device. Any device designed to create a temporary or permanent intestinal narrowing or obstruction would be affecting the structure, form, or function of the human body and is not simply a supplement. I would love to know what their regulatory status was and how long it's been since their last regulatory colonoscopy.
The FDA and OCR have the capacity to receive and act on public complaints, for what that's worth.
Right, because nationalization of corporations always leads to better availability, lower prices, and superior quality. Always.
The orphan drug program is indeed a disgrace. It allows the re-imposition of a government-mandated monopoly over a previously well-understood compound, simply to give a company an incentive to make and sell the drug. Getting rid of the company does nothing except make the drug unavailable again.
Want to solve the "national health emergency"? Easy. Make the regulatory and market protection of orphan drugs contingent on a price that is exclusively tied to the cost of making the compound, plus a reasonable markup. Provide full litigation immunity for anything short of gross negligence. Get the bottom-feeding marketeers and the bottom-feeding lawyers out of the pool, and things are likely to improve quickly.
Most of what's on my phone is pretty simple: call logs, emails, texts, calendar entries, and files synced through various cloud services.
All of which, interestingly, are available to law enforcement armed with a proper warrant, assuming they know enough to ask. My phone is just one convenient place to find them, and the only one a random LEO might find in my pocket during a contrived search.
Now if that LEO really has probable cause, they can get my calls and contacts. They can get my emails. They can get my files. Heck, if they subpoena Verizon and Google they can get the history of the towers I've hit and the places I've parked my car. About the only thing they can't get is immediate access to that information without a decent reason and without having to go to the trouble of a real investigation.
In other words, encryption on a phone is unusually bad because it particularly affects lazy, dishonest, or incompetent law enforcement officials. God forbid...
(And to the smug ones saying that the Secret Encoder Key that reveals the location of a hostage might be found on a pedophile's phone, stored nowhere else and for some reason in plaintext on the phone as opposed to any one of a number of encrypting storage applications, I would simply advise them to buy lottery tickets, because they've cleaned out pretty much all the long odds by now.)
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by deniablesources.
Just run-of-the-mill kicking of the can
The judge has no discernible argument with the constitution. This is not a constitutional issue for this judge. It's an issue of disturbance of judicial naps. With this non-result, the status quo is preserved and nobody cares. Hands washed, back to sleep.
By the time there's an appeal, the question will be moot for 2016. If someone actually gets arrested for it in the meantime, they can be the plaintiff and own the problem on a different lawsuit and the judge gets to dodge entirely.
It's a legal system, not a justice system.
Perfect!
So in exchange for crippling a feature - AutoHop for recently broadcast content - that I neither use nor care about, I get another feature - Sling TV - that I will neither use nor care about. What could be better?
I think he had help
Given that the first two brief statements in that press release were from the County Executive and the County Council President, and that he is specifically called out as a mere "County Council Member", I'm betting that there was a meeting where the adults in the room explained reality to him.
Which doesn't change the fact that he did make a real apology, but I don't think it got as far as his lawyer.
And thus we see ...
The entire country of Spain taking advantage of their "right to be forgotten". Nice knowing you...
HIPAA?
HIPAA doesn't sanction all disclosure of Protected Healthcare Information (PHI). It sanctions disclosure of PHI from covered entities, which include people and organizations that practice medicine or provide administrative support to those who do. If you want to make a HIPAA claim against Roca, you'd have to establish that they were indeed a covered entity, which is a challenge when you're talking about simply selling a product on the Internet, even when that product purports to have pharmaceutical effect.
Where Roca might be in more trouble is that they claim to be providing medical consultation services, which absolutely does make them a covered entity for those services. That might be fun. The Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights(OCR) pursues HIPAA claims, and they can be decidedly nasty at times.
The FDA is implicated also. While I suspect they're hiding behind the "nutritional supplements" exemption, Roca is pretty clearly selling a product which is by its simple description a medical device. Any device designed to create a temporary or permanent intestinal narrowing or obstruction would be affecting the structure, form, or function of the human body and is not simply a supplement. I would love to know what their regulatory status was and how long it's been since their last regulatory colonoscopy.
The FDA and OCR have the capacity to receive and act on public complaints, for what that's worth.
Right, because nationalization of corporations always leads to better availability, lower prices, and superior quality. Always.
The orphan drug program is indeed a disgrace. It allows the re-imposition of a government-mandated monopoly over a previously well-understood compound, simply to give a company an incentive to make and sell the drug. Getting rid of the company does nothing except make the drug unavailable again.
Want to solve the "national health emergency"? Easy. Make the regulatory and market protection of orphan drugs contingent on a price that is exclusively tied to the cost of making the compound, plus a reasonable markup. Provide full litigation immunity for anything short of gross negligence. Get the bottom-feeding marketeers and the bottom-feeding lawyers out of the pool, and things are likely to improve quickly.
So what's the concern about phones, exactly?
Most of what's on my phone is pretty simple: call logs, emails, texts, calendar entries, and files synced through various cloud services.
All of which, interestingly, are available to law enforcement armed with a proper warrant, assuming they know enough to ask. My phone is just one convenient place to find them, and the only one a random LEO might find in my pocket during a contrived search.
Now if that LEO really has probable cause, they can get my calls and contacts. They can get my emails. They can get my files. Heck, if they subpoena Verizon and Google they can get the history of the towers I've hit and the places I've parked my car. About the only thing they can't get is immediate access to that information without a decent reason and without having to go to the trouble of a real investigation.
In other words, encryption on a phone is unusually bad because it particularly affects lazy, dishonest, or incompetent law enforcement officials. God forbid...
(And to the smug ones saying that the Secret Encoder Key that reveals the location of a hostage might be found on a pedophile's phone, stored nowhere else and for some reason in plaintext on the phone as opposed to any one of a number of encrypting storage applications, I would simply advise them to buy lottery tickets, because they've cleaned out pretty much all the long odds by now.)