This isn’t how medical privacy is supposed to work.

Pennsylvania is in love with fracking, and they don’t care who knows it. Their legislature passed a bill last month that makes it a secret what awful chemicals that energy companies are injecting into the ground in order to extract natural gas. It’s such a secret, in fact, that if somebody is poisoned by some …

Should voting histories be private?

The Roanoke Times editorialized today in favor of the Know Campaign’s guilt-based GOTV campaign, and I couldn’t agree more. That was the conservative group who was looking to send out mailers telling people which of their neighbors have voted in recent elections. The SBE was upset, as were many citizens, who complained that whether or …

Virginia’s SSN protection doesn’t particularly protect them.

Last week a new law went into effect that exempts the first five digits of social security numbers from FOIA requests. Which strikes me as a good thing. It’s a result of Del. Joe May’s HB2427. But, unfortunately, it looks like that’s not actually helpful. Why? The structure of the SSN makes the first five …