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"Kathy Silver, CEO of University Medical Center, learned three weeks ago that names, birth dates and Social Security numbers for at least 21 patients were leaked from the hospital - a crime being investigated by the FBI. But the hospital still has not disclosed the breach to the patients, Silver told a committee of legislators Wednesday. She spoke as if this was not a problem. The law allows 60 days from the time UMC learns of a security breach to inform patients, she said. One victim says that is too long to wait to tell patients they may be at risk of identity theft. The hospital should have disclosed the breach immediately, said a 40-year-old UMC patient whose personal information - the kind that can be used for identity theft - was leaked. The man, who went to the public hospital Nov. 1 after a motorcycle accident, learned his privacy had been breached only when a Las Vegas Sun reporter told him Wednesday afternoon. The man was stunned and angry to learn from someone other than hospital officials that his data had been leaked. Hospital officials should have notified him "way sooner," he said. "I would've given them two or three days after they initially found out. But this is a major thing - a priority thing!""

"Two L.A. traffic engineers who pleaded guilty to hacking into the city's signal system and slowing traffic at key intersections as part of a labor protest have been sentenced to two years' probation. Authorities said that Gabriel Murillo, 40, and Kartik Patel, 37, hacked into the system in 2006 despite the city's efforts to block access during a labor action. Fearful that the strikers could wreak havoc, the city temporarily blocked all engineers from access to the computer that controls traffic signals. But authorities said Patel and Murillo found a way in and picked their targets with care -- intersections they knew would cause significant backups because they were close to freeways and major destinations. The engineers programmed the signals so that red lights for several days starting Aug. 21, 2006 would be extremely long on the most congested approaches to the intersections, causing gridlock. Cars backed up at Los Angeles International Airport, at a key intersection in Studio City, at access onto the clogged Glendale Freeway and throughout the streets of Little Tokyo and the L.A. Civic Center area, sources told The Times at the time. No accidents occurred as a result. As part of their plea deal, the engineers agreed to pay $6,250 in restitution and completed 240 hours of community service."

""So many people in America think this does not affect them. They've been convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists. … I think that's wrong. … Our programs are not perfect, and it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs," former CIA Assistant General Counsel Suzanne Spaulding tells FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith in Spying on the Home Front. 9/11 has indelibly altered America in ways that people are now starting to earnestly question: not only perpetual orange alerts, barricades and body frisks at the airport, but greater government scrutiny of people's records and electronic surveillance of their communications. The watershed, officials tell FRONTLINE, was the government's shift after 9/11 to a strategy of pre-emption at home -- not just prosecuting terrorists for breaking the law, but trying to find and stop them before they strike. President Bush described his anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation has found that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions of Americans; the FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers, and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree."

It affects each & every US citizen in one way or another. Good video on privacy & security.

Insulin pumps are vulnerable to determined hackers who could also remotely mess up the readings of blood-sugar monitors, Jerome Radcliffe, a security researcher who has diabetes revealed at the Black Hat computer security conference, Las Vegas, Nevada. In other words, a hacker could cause a diabetic patient to receive either too much or too little insulin.

Photos, addresses, family ties, court documents, details from MySpace profiles -- the moment information is published online, it can be copied and re-posted, and often is.

Hackers will soon gain a powerful new tool for breaking into Oracle Corp's database, the top-selling business software used by companies to store electronic information. Security experts have developed an easy-to-use, automated software tool that can remotely break into Oracle databases over the Internet to simulate attacks on computer systems, but cybercrooks can use it for hacking. The tool's authors created it through a controversial open-source software project known as Metasploit, which releases its free software over the Web. Chris Gates, a security tester who co-developed the Metasploit tool, will unveil it next week at the annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, where thousands of security experts and hackers will gather to exchange trade secrets. "Anyone with no skill and knowledge can download and run it," said Pete Finnigan, an independent consultant who specializes in Oracle security and who advises large corporations and government agencies.

"Reporting from Washington - When your doctor writes you a prescription, that's just between you, your doctor and maybe your health insurance company -- right? Wrong. As things stand now, the pharmaceutical companies that make those prescription drugs are looking over the doctor's shoulder to keep track of how many prescriptions for each drug the physician is writing. By obtaining data from pharmacies and health insurers, the drug companies learn the prescribing habits of thousands of doctors. That information has become not just a powerful sales and marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry but also a source of growing concern among some elected officials, healthcare advocates and legal authorities. "

"Fomer UCLA Healthcare System researcher Huping Zhou has pleaded guilty to violating parts of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and could be one of the first people in the country convicted under the law, federal authorities announced Friday. After learning he was to be let go, the 48-year-old is alleged to have accessed the UCLA patient records system 323 times during the three-week period, mostly to check out the files of celebrities, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. The names of the targeted stars have not been revealed. Federal authorities say Zhou admitted to accessing the records -- cruising files that were not necessary to view as part of his job -- under a plea agreement. He'll face a judge for sentencing March 22. It's not clear what kind of punishment the U.S. Attorney's Office will recommend in exchange for his cooperation."

In October 2001, the Bush administration took an administrative action that would prove sadly symptomatic of its rule. John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, issued a memorandum warning against casual release of information to the public under the Freedom of Information Act. Such releases, Ashcroft said, should be made "only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests that could be implicated." In case anyone missed the point, Ashcroft added that any bureaucrat who said no to such a request could "be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis." It goes without saying that Ashcroft did not promise any such defense of government employees who released information under the terms of the act. If cavalier disregard of the law and the public's right to hold its government accountable were hallmarks of the recently departed administration, we can only hope that President Obama's response signals a new approach. One of his first presidential acts was to issue a memo to federal agencies on the Freedom of Information Act. It opens by quoting former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' pronouncement that sunlight is the "best of disinfectants" and continues by trumpeting the act as "the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government." Where Ashcroft searched for excuses to withhold information, Obama directed all agencies to "adopt a presumption" in favor of releasing it.

Hunch.com helps users search for answers -- but first, it performs a detailed search on the users themselves. Launching today after a year in development, Hunch aims to supply users with computer-generated advice on thousands of lifestyle and consumer questions: What kind of dog should I buy? What should I get dad for Father's Day? Which book by George Orwell would I like? Most important, though, Hunch is not a search engine. Rather than scouring the open Web for information, as Google, Microsoft's new Bing and scores of others do, or collating written opinions, as Amazon.com does, Hunch computes answers by comparing what it knows about you to what it knows about people like you. "Ultimately, what we're doing is providing a kind of shortcut through human expert systems," said Hunch founder Caterina Fake, who also started Flickr.com, the popular photo-sharing site that was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By first inviting users to answer as many as 1,500 questions about themselves -- an addictive kind of personality test that involves such diverse questions as political orientation, relationship status and whether you believe in UFOs and keep your closet organized -- Hunch looks to assemble a demographic profile whose depth could rival anything in the commercial universe. The New York company also believes that users stand to benefit from this kind of large-scale data farming -- not just from getting better answers, but also from discovering the many microdemographics to which they belong. Hunch also says it will not sell user data to marketers. But this promise, written into the site's privacy policy, is not precisely a legal contract, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a new-media scholar at the University of Virginia, and the difference leaves the data it collects in a fuzzy domain.

Further proof that LA has it head in the clouds - A plan to overhaul the city of Los Angeles' computer system is raising concerns about the security of confidential information. The nation's second-largest city is considering dumping its in-house computer network for Google Inc. e-mail and office programs that are accessed over the Internet. But the city police union says it doesn't have enough information to determine if sensitive witness and investigation files will be secure from hackers. Google spokeswoman Aviva Gilbert says security "is built into the DNA of our products."

A plan to overhaul the city of Los Angeles' computer system is raising concerns about the security of confidential information. The nation's second-largest city is considering dumping its in-house computer network for Google Inc. e-mail and office programs that are accessed over the Internet. But the city police union says it doesn't have enough information to determine if sensitive witness and investigation files will be secure from hackers. Google spokeswoman Aviva Gilbert says security "is built into the DNA of our products."