Privacy, Right of

Theresa Marie Schiavo died March 31, 2005. The 41-year-old's human and
communicative faculties were so deficient that a feeding tube was necessary to
nourish her and she had been silent for 15 years. In her final month, Ms. Schiavo's
health, the dispute between her husband and parents concerning the removal of her
feeding tube, and her subsequent death were covered extensively by American
broadcast, online and print media. As she lay silent in a Florida hospice, the U.S.
Congress, the president and the courts intervened, and those who spoke about her
matter and the news media propelled her human tragedy toward the top of the public
agenda. News stories, reports and analyses of the case from Time, Newsweek, The
New York Times, The Washington Post and St. Petersburg Times are analyzed using a
critical-qualitative approach to framing.

Medical information is very private and sensitive. With the digitization of medical data, it is becoming accessible through distributed systems, including the Internet. Access to all this information and appropriate exchange of data makes the job of health providers more effective, however, the number of people that can potentially access this information increases by orders of magnitude. Private health information is not well protected. We present guidelines for security models for medical information systems. First, we model the structure of the medical information in the form of object-oriented patterns. Second, we study models and patterns in use today and compare them to our patterns. Next we define requirements necessary for controlling access, and describe the common policies and restrictions of security models for medical applications. We present some of the medical record access control restrictions directly in a conceptual model of the medical information.

National Security Letters allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain records on individuals from corporations without prior judicial intervention or approval. Statutory changes, most significantly those resulting from the passage of the United States Patriot Act in 2001, have substantially altered the four different federal statutes from which National Security Letters originate. In creating these National Security Letters the government intended to protect its citizens from national security threats. This goal has been regarded historically as legitimate, but the legislation potentially limits rights, which raises the question of whether these letters are acceptable. Drawing on relevant case law and scholarly opinion, I argue that use of these letters is unacceptable and may render the Fourth Amendment's protection of person and property from unreasonable searches meaningless in certain federal investigations.

DNA profiling is a newly developed technique used by law enforcement agencies in the United States as a form of individual identification to prove whether a suspect is guilty. Due to the fact that it is a newly developed technology there is little legislation to regulate its proper uses and restrictions. Therefore restrictions are largely determined by court decisions as to whether DNA profiling violates constitutional rights. Current decisions in state and federal district courts tend to permit use of DNA profiling without a warrant. These decisions violate principles of privacy guaranteed by the US Constitution as interpreted in pre-DNA fourth amendment cases. By drawing on fourth amendment case law and commentaries, I shall argue that while in some cases no warrant is required for DNA profiling - when it is conducted upon people who have been convicted of a felony - or all other people, a warrant should be required.