StorageMojo

A SWAT team busts open your door, grabs all your computer gear, and arrests you for child pornography
That would be a swell day, eh? Oh, and then you lose your job, your friends shun you and strangers feel free to beat you to death. Or maybe you just decide to end it all. Thirty-nine people did.

All because of identity theft. And self-righteous, computer-illiterate police.

On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog
Actually, according to a recent article in the Guardian

. . . thousands of cases under Operation Ore have been built on the shakiest of foundations - the use of credit card details to sign up for pornography websites. In many cases, the card details were stolen; the sites contained nothing or legal material only; and the people who allegedly signed up to visit the sites never went there.

Among the accused: “. . . musicians Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist, and Robert del Naja of Massive Attack, both falsely accused of accessing child pornography.”

Landslide
You may dimly recall a credit card site that both processed payments and authenticated credit card numbers whose owner is now serving a 180 year term for carrying listings to several overseas child-porn sites as well as thousands of legal adult porn sites. About 250,000 names and card numbers were seized from the site’s computers.

Over 7,000 of those names were British.

Here in the US, the FBI sent emails to people on the list offering child porn. About 100 responded. In the UK, police assumed that the people on the list were all active consumers. People lost jobs, lives, homes, friends and had to spend thousands defending themselves against the allegations.

And I thought medical identity theft was bad
You haven’t heard of medical identity theft? From a report by the World Privacy Forum:

Medical identity theft occurs when someone uses a person’s name and sometimes other parts of their identity — such as insurance information — without the person’s knowledge or consent to obtain medical services or goods, or uses the person’s identity information to make false claims for medical services or goods.

So you can be tagged as someone with HIV, cancer or TB and suddenly denied insurance. You may be dunned for $40,000 worth of surgery you never had. You may be tagged as a drug addict thanks to prescriptions in your name. Or you may be denied employment due to fabricated mental health problems.

Have a nice weekend.

The StorageMojo take
Massive storage is a wonderful thing. Yet we are still in the early stages of understanding how to ensure that information about people is valid, especially financial and medical information. Electronic medical records, which are a valid tool for improving medical care, only make this risk worse. I know IBM and Sun have been doing some work in this area, and I’d be happy to publish information about what other companies are doing as well.

In the meantime, WPF has a number of recommendations for improving patient access to medical records. As for shoddy police work, I’m afraid that will always be with us and innocent people will suffer the consequences.

Comments welcome, as always. I’ve been cranking away on the toughest competitive analysis project of my career for a client and its been eating up my time something fierce. I’ll be getting to the second part of “EMC has Ph.Ds?” next week.

Over at Storage Bits, my new ZDnet blog, I wrote about Secure Erase, a feature that Walter Purvis at Data Mobility Group told me about.

Secure Erase (SE) excited so much attention over there that I thought I’d take a more leisurely stroll through it here.

Free, secure, ATA drive erasure
SE is built into virtually all P/SATA drives built since 2001, when it became part of the ATA standard. It is virtually unknown however, because many BIOSes block the command and some even lock the drive to keep the data safe from Murphy’s-law-abiding citizens. Not to mention evil virus writers.

More secure than external wipers
Since it is internal to the drive, it doesn’t exact much overhead compared to external wipers like the open source Boot and Nuke or similar commercial products. Even better, it is more secure, protecting the data from keyboard (file recovery utilities) attacks and laboratory attacks.

In fact, NIST rates SE’s effectiveness on a par with degaussing a hard drive. Degaussing (strong magnetic field) is losing favor because of a combination of increasing media coercivity and improved magnetic shielding. Once HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) arrives, it may be practically impossible to degauss a drive short of a nuclear weapon’s electro-magnetic pulse. Then we’ll likely be down to Secure Erase and physical destruction as NIST-approved methods of sanitizing disks.

A blunt instrument
SE doesn’t give you many choices: it erases all the user space on the drive, one track at a time. It can erase HPA (Host Protected Area) or DCO (Device Configuration Overlay) areas, if any, as well. Some drives implement an enhanced Secure Erase which instead of writing zeros writes a pattern set by the vendor and that overwrites all bad blocks as well.

When the process is done your drive is empty and ready for OS formatting.

But wait! There’s more!
Check out UCSD’s Center for Magnetic Recording Research to learn more about a leading center of research with the goal of 1 terabit/sq. inch recording. Dr. Gordon Hughes, an IEEE fellow, on the faculty has created a utility that enables SE on Windows machines, available from his CMRR home page. This utility is for experienced storage heads and is not noob-friendly.

Dr. Hughes has also co-authored a paper (pdf) called Data Sanitization Tutorial that gives a brief, 12 page overview of the requirements and options for secure data elimination.

If you are in government, or deal with those who are, you should also check NIST’s special Computer Security publication page. Of special interest is publication 800-88 “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” which covers disks and other media as well.

The StorageMojo take
Secure Erase is an interesting and little known addition to the storage pro’s toolkit. If anyone whips up a tool for using it under Mac OS X or Linux, please let me know.

Comments welcome, as always.

After you sign over everything you own, we can be friends
The folks over at Redmond Channel Partner ["partner" sounds so much better than "lackey", don't you think?] report on a Japanese anti-trust investigation of Microsoft. The issue: intellectual property (IP).

Excellent! Where do I sign?
RCP reports:

The Fair Trade Commission, the nation’s antitrust body, and Microsoft have been wrangling since 2004 over a controversial clause in licensing agreements.

The clause prevents companies from suing Microsoft over patent and copyright infringement if they suspect their own software technology has ended up in the Windows operating system.

Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, has repeatedly said the clause is lawful. It dropped the clause in 2004.

The commission has said it suspects the clause has helped Microsoft unlawfully infringe patents. Hearings have been held in Tokyo to look at the commission’s and Microsoft’s positions. Smith said a decision from the commission is expected in 2008.

The clause has so far prevented companies from bringing infringement complaints against Microsoft, said Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, who oversees policy on intellectual property and competition issues worldwide.

“Maybe they would have some new ability to raise that claim,” including possible lawsuits against Microsoft and computer manufacturers, if the commission rejects Microsoft’s view, he said.

Commission officials are not certain that Microsoft has violated any patents, and it is still unclear what the commission may decide.

Of course Microsoft has nothing to worry about
Why would they be the least nervous about such a provision being quashed?

Great party, until the anti-trust guys crashed it
The essence of anti-trust is when a company uses market power to win concessions - such as the one the Japanese are investigating - that it wouldn’t get otherwise.

If your company depends upon interoperating with Windows and Microsoft insists that you not sue them if some of your technology shows up in Windows, Microsoft is essentially extorting your agreement to grant them your IP. Absent Microsoft’s substantial market power, who would ever agree to such a thing? It is an abuse of market power even if they never appropriated a single line of code. Unless, evidently, you are a Microsoft lawyer or executive.

If we’re partners, why can’t I have all your stuff for free too?
In general, I don’t trust large companies to “do the right thing” with IP. Even a generally ethical company like HP sometimes veers off into gray areas. The real issue is that you are always dealing with individuals who may have their own agenda, regardless of company policy. And when company culture supports a “by any means necessary” attitude, look out.

Nice doggy, nice doggy. . .
So how do you deal with a large company that claims they are interested in acquiring you or your product and just needs to do some “due diligence”. You know, combing through your source code, picking your architect’s brains, and studying your key algorithms. Oh yeah, and we’ll want to glance at your books, too.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if being lonely and needy made you more attractive?
When you feel little, weak and undercapitalized it can be hard to resist the blandishments of a big company making a fuss over you. “You’re so smart,” they say and even strong men start to simper.

The StorageMojo take
General policy: focus on the what your product does, rather than the “how” it does it. Don’t be flattered or bullied into over broad disclosure, even if they say they are talking to the competition. Stick to the business value of your product and how the features support that business value. Show some skin and then ask for some consideration in return. It is a courtship, not a strip search.

Don’t let your engineers talk to their engineers by themselves - engineers love to brag about how smart they are - while encouraging brainstorming on creative ways the larger company could monetize an investment in the product. You may still get screwed, but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you made them work for it.

Comments welcome of course. I’m off to NAB and then SNW next week, but even so I’ll have a very interesting post available Tuesday morning, early.

A distinguished scholar published a book last year about data replication in the Greek-speaking ancient world. He examined a group of texts and how the technology and context of the times affected data integrity.

He looked at (I think he had some help) over 5700 ancient source texts, all of them at least copies of copies of copies, to find textual variants. There are over 250,000 variants, or more than one for every word of the texts. Makes floppies look like graven stone.

Boy, do we have it good!
We may complain about migrating data from one Windows machine to another, but the ancients had it far worse. Data replication technology was a guy looking at a text and copying it. No printing presses, not even punchcards. Primitive in the extreme.

The UI really stunk!
The standard scribal technique was to write without lifting pen from parchment, papyrus, vellum or whatever. No gaps between the words. No punctuation. TheywouldjustwriteandwriteuntilwellIdonotknowwhentheywouldstop. And they wouldn’t have that period there. Needless to say, no paragraphs, headers or hypertext links.

No wonder people couldn’t read. With text like that who would want to?

Reading a Turing machine tape, except in Greek
People make mistakes. Bored people make mistakes. Poorly trained people make more mistakes. Usually the folks copying these texts were amateurs, making a copy for themselves or for friends, maybe at the end of a long day. The words all running together, many of the words looking alike. Some common error patterns emerged, such as:

• Mistaking one letter or word for another
• Eye-skips, where the copyist skipped a line
• Dictation errors, where one person was reading to the copyist and a word was substituted for one it sounded like

Mistakes on purpose
People, being people, often have opinions about a text, and sometimes the copyist would change the text to, in their opinion, correct or improve the text. Much of the book is taken up with analyzing where and why these changes were introduced, using rules developed by scholars over several hundred years to attempt to reconstruct the original text.

AFAIK no other ancient text has received such rigorous scholarly treatment. I find the techniques fascinating, even if they result in less certainty, rather than more, about the original, long lost, text.

Modern day counterparts
Our ability to store massive amounts of data has a downside: we can store massive amounts of error as well. Credit reports have high error rates that can cost people real money. America’s infamous “no-fly” list has snagged Senator Ted Kennedy and the wife of another Senator. To err is human. To err and preserve it in computer files demonic.

Oh, and the text is:
The New Testament. The book on textual analysis is Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. Bart is chairman of the religious studies department at UNC. A fascinating book, aimed at laypeople, on New Testament textual analysis. I highly recommend it.

The StorageMojo take
I’m not making or asking for any comment of the religious implications of Bart’s textual analysis of the New Testament. What is valuable, IMHO, is the awareness that information gets altered in many ways for many reasons.

Even in the age of bit-perfect digital copies, we also have tools that allow us to edit, alter and even fake digital information. One of the highest purposes of education is foster the ability to evaluate information independently of supposed authority, provenance or reliability. I don’t think that will ever change no matter what technological marvels we develop.

Comments welcome, of course. I haven’t been writing as frequently as I would like on StorageMojo due partly to travel and to other work, including my new blog on ZDnet. I plan to keep up with both, yet I expect it will take some time for me to figure out what, if any, the audience differences are between the two.

Intel last week provided a window into just how screwed up even wealthy, forward looking companies are around document retention for pending litigation. In the law biz these policies go under the general term of “litigation hold”. Intel is in Federal court on an anti-trust suit filed by competitor AMD in June 2005.

The recent changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) added explicit requirements for electronically stored information (ESI) on December 1st, but litigation hold policies have been around for ages (for more info see Sto’Mo’s 3 Minute Guide to Electronic Discovery and Today’s the Day: New FRCP Rules Now in Effect). Which makes Intel’s behavior even more peculiar.

Let 1,000 litigation hold policies bloom
Intel’s email system automatically purges emails after short time, said by Intel to be about three months. It was only in October of 2005 that they started a weekly backup of the emails of executives whose actions might be relevant to the case. Until then they asked that employees voluntarily retain any emails that might be germane. Even after the backups started, an employee could receive and delete an email immediately to avoid having it backed up.

In effect, Intel replaced a single corporate litigation hold policy with one for every employee. With potentially billions of dollars damages at stake may one be forgiven for thinking that one of the world’s most successful high-tech companies might have done better?

Dumb, yes; malicious, maybe not
There is no evidence now that Intel sought to hide incriminating emails, which could bring disastrous “adverse inferences” from the judge if the case goes to a jury. Yet AMD’s legal team will be looking for evidence that Intel is hiding something, and if they find any Intel will have no one but itself to blame.

Intel will now invest in software that automatically preserves the emails of designated employees. One has to wonder why they waited until now.

The StorageMojo take
The resolution of Intel’s email retention liability may add to the evolving case law of ESI and electronic discovery. It certainly should serve as a warning to large companies that audited litigation hold policies are a necessity.

A sheepish “oops!” and a good-faith effort to recover lost documents may protect a company if no evidence of a cover up is found today, but in a few years judges and corporate audit committees will not be so forgiving. Get your litigation hold policies in order now, or face real pain sooner rather than later.

Comments welcome, please. I’m spending much of the day on an airplane headed back to StorageMojo’s Fortress of Solitude in the Arizona mountains, so moderation will be a bit slow.

Today’s Wall Street Journal article Skimming Devices Target Debit-Card Readers (subscription required, I fear) describes how thieves are hacking debit cards: replace store credit card mag stripe readers with ones that copy the mag card data and the PIN. The thieves leave them in place for a few days, swap them out, and go on a big spending spree - with your money.

That sounds familiar . . .
In principle, similar to the the keyloggers seen on some public keyboards that record all your keystrokes so thieves capture your passwords. Which is why it is smart to take a flash thumb drive loaded with your own software, including an on-screen keyboard for entering passwords, when you travel.

Performance anxiety
For all the focus on data theft from hacking computer systems, the Journal reports:

A recent study by Gartner Inc. analyst Avivah Litan found that 80% of credit-card data breaches are tied to cash-register and other POS terminals. Robert McCullen, [CEO of] a Chicago-based security firm that has serviced about 30,000 businesses, says that in the past two years it has handled more than 200 incidents of POS breaches and that its cases in 2006 doubled from the previous year.

Mag stripes are an ISO standard (7811) storing 226 bytes on a credit card. A cheap gigabyte flash chip could easily store millions of debit cards and associated PINs. The card reader technology is cheap and available. One ring got its data for a $100,000 haul from a couple of hacked gas station card readers.

You even build your own mag stripe reader. Something for the entire hacker family to enjoy!

Par-tay!
The crimes are lucrative and low-risk too.

Two years ago, the Secret Service busted a ring masterminded by two individuals in Miami who stole more than $56 million by skimming data and creating fake cards.

Thankfully not every criminal is so ambitious.

New! Improved security!
The article suggests that new technology makes it more difficult for thieves to skim debit cards, but how much has changed: the card reader reads your data; you enter a PIN; your data gets shipped across a network. Seems eminently hackable to me. Maybe better informed readers can elucidate.

The StorageMojo take
Banks like mag stripe because it is cheap. And banks are happy to shift the burden of enforcement for easily hacked technology to taxpayers, just as credit reporting firms have done with identity theft. With their enormous lobbying budgets - banks spent $100 million buying Congress for the new bankruptcy law - don’t expect Ebay on the Potomac to come to our aid any time soon.

I’m sure there are ways to solve this problem, but they’ll cost money that banks and retailers won’t want to spend. So taxpayers and victims will foot the bill for a 40 year old storage technology that hasn’t kept pace with our changing needs.

Comments welcome, of course. Moderation turned on so spam can be turned off.

Tech support for books
So you are an experienced reader of scrolls and someone hands you a book. How do you figure it out? That’s the premise of this Norwegian TV skit (subtitles provided). Funny.

Watching that reminded me of a recent New Yorker article about the Google Book Search project.

$800 million to scan and store all the world’s books
I was never much for library research, stacks of notecards, outlines. I love libraries and until recently carted around a large collection of books in addition to about a thousand CDs and some 600 DVDs. Still have about 25 LPs as well, things that I intend to digitize one of these days, like a few disks of the Tiffany transcriptions of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys (their best work IMHO) and Chaucer readings in the original middle English.

Finally started getting rid of the books though: just too heavy and bulky. I also realized that I was hanging on to them for largely sentimental reasons: bright college years and such. It’s been a few years since I could pass for a grad student, even in my own memory. So I love the Google Books Project goal to digitize all the world’s books.

Publishers and some authors don’t like it
It is the same problem the record companies are having, only more important to all of us. I mean, who really cares if you can’t get the 13th Floor Elevators first album any more?

Yet so much of the world’s knowledge is locked up in libraries, printed in books that had a total press run of a few thousand, tops. It would be so great to be able to research a topic in-depth from my kitchen table.

So why do we need publishers now anyway?
The cost of on-line publication is practically zero. Preparing the book for publication is still a cost, yet much less than printed books require. I can only think of two reasons why we might still need publishers: as a brand and editorial service, such as Poisoned Pen Press that publishes consistently high quality mysteries and as a marketing service. No printers, no shipping, automated shopping - what else is there? Book tours?

Of course, the opportunities for censorship are huge
Google got bent out of shape when a reporter published Eric Schmidt’s home address using Google search tools and banned that publisher from Google events. So I hope that Google will not be the only way to search the scanned books. Other than that, sounds like a big win to me.

The StorageMojo take
Cheap, persistent storage and broadband can bring the equivalent of the world’s finest libraries to every home and school. That is a win for us all. Especially my aching back.

Books won’t go away. High quality reproduction of art and photographs will outpace what display technology can do for quite some time to come. Ultimately though, books are a technology, just like 78 rpm records, and they are in the process of being superceded by online digital publishing. The industry needs to wake up and rethink their value proposition in a world of cheap replication and storage.

Comments welcome: why will you keep your books? Do you expect your children to? Moderation turned on because spammers use cheap publishing too.

The always thoughtful and incisive Bruce Schneier is out with his latest CRYPTO-GRAM. He’s got an interesting take on a government-mandated $11 billion personal storage program: Real-ID.

No debate, no vote
People in other countries - yes, there are Americans who know there are other countries (thanks, Eddie Izzard) - may find this hard to credit, but Americans are opposed to a national ID card. There is no centralized identity database or any entity that issues ID that everyone carries. A majority of Americans are against it.

So why do we have an $11 billion program for a national ID card? Because congressman James Sensenbrenner, chairman of a powerful committee, attached it to a bill that no one was willing to vote against. So it became law.
With no debate.

An ID card is personalized storage; the database behind it a horrorshow
But what does an ID card have to do with security? The theory is that if we know who everyone is, we can keep the bad guys from acting bad. As Schneier points out, this theory has no support in real life:

A reliance on ID cards is based on a dangerous security myth, that if only we knew who everyone was, we could pick the bad guys out of the crowd.

In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that denoted intention. We’d want all terrorists to carry a card that said “evildoer” and everyone else to carry a card that said “honest person who won’t try to hijack or blow up anything.” Then security would be easy. . . .

This is, of course, ridiculous; so we rely on identity as a substitute. . . .

Even worse, as soon as you divide people into two categories — more trusted and less trusted people — you create a third, and very dangerous, category: untrustworthy people whom we have no reason to mistrust. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; the Washington, DC, snipers; the London subway bombers; and many of the 9/11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. . . .

There’s another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. Think of all the problems with the government’s no-fly list. That list, which is what Real IDs will be checked against, not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it also causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile.

That last item, the no-fly list, points to all the problems with the databases behind the Real-ID programs: loaded with errors; accessed by hundreds of thousands of mostly-honest but not-all-that-well-paid public employees; and no standards among the 50 state databases. Fake Real-ID cards and real Real-ID cards with fake info won’t take long to proliferate. So what is the point?

The StorageMojo take
Massive storage is a wonderful thing - used correctly (see Massive Storage In Our Brave New World one of the funniest things I’ve written). But if there one thing the founding fathers would warn: government will use it to restrict our freedom. Any security improvements will be incidental.

Along with our silly new passports (see Stupid Gov’t Trick: Wireless Passport Storage) the Real-ID program shows that our post-9/11 government knows as little about security as it does about Iraq.

Only constant vigilance will preserve our freedom in the age of massive storage. Just like every other age.

Cisco’s just-announced acquisition of IronPort for $830 million is a shot across the bow of, among others, EMC’s RSA acquisition. As I wrote about Datacenter Ventures last September

A couple of people commented that network security is evolving from attempting to lock everything down inside the data center to using the WAN gateway as the security choke point. Seems about right.

Spam you don’t get doesn’t need to be stored
IronPort products provide perimeter protection against Internet-based malware. Blocking spam and viruses at the WAN gateway through a variety of techniques, IronPort exemplifies the advantages of using the WAN gateway as the security choke point.

EMC is just collateral damage
I doubt Cisco management spends much time worrying about EMC’s effort in the security business. From a network perspective each storage array and SAN switch is a potential choke point. Yet each array is limited by the amount of data each array stores and how often that data is accessed. The data velocity and temperature at the WAN gateway is orders of magnitude higher than at any storage array, making investment there that much more profitable.

Internal data security: trust vs. compliance
SANs store data that is already on the internal network. So the security issues cluster around who has access to what data and what can they do with it. There EMC’s RSA acquisition makes sense. Yet internet spam and viruses are a highly visible problem that can cripple your network today. Data theft and misuse is a more subtle problem.

The StorageMojo take
Given inertia, and flat budgets, most managers would rather trust their employees until they have a demonstrated reason not to. Which suggests to me that EMC will have a harder time monetizing their RSA investment than Cisco will with IronPort and its other security acquisitions.

More importantly, the reasons behind Cisco’s continued investments in network security - larger customer ROI chief among them - shows once more that network effects are alive and well. A large network is more valuable than a small one, and in most organizations the SAN is significantly smaller than the LAN+WAN gateway.

ILM redux?
EMC has to make their case based on the value, rather than the connectedness, of the SAN’s data. As ILM’s difficulties show, value-based data assessment and protection is a costly and difficult process. Creating hyper-scale, cost-effective storage pools would go a long way towards making storage-based security a much better customer investment.

Comments welcome, of course. EMC’ers (or other storage security mavens) feel free to weigh in and tell me what I’ve missed.

Friends of Fair Use, rejoice: it appears that the encryption on high-def movies, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD has been broken.

Consumer content encryption is a fool’s game
This looks like a war the movie industry can’t win. Why?

• Sell the consumer the encrypted content
• Sell the consumer the de-encryption device, i.e. a content player
• With access to the input, the output and the decryption device, it is only a matter of time before the encryption algorithm is broken.

This is analogous to the Allied breaking of the German military codes during WWII. When the Poles reverse-engineered the military Enigma, it was only a matter of time before a smart mathematician figured out how to recover the frequently changed encryption keys. The British, at Bletchley Park, turned this process into a computer-assisted industrial system for large-scale key recovery and decryption, but the essential math has been known for many decades.

The HD case is much simpler. With millions - eventually - of HD DVD players out there, the movie industry has no way of changing the encryption keys. Ergo, they have no hope of keeping the encryption system secure.

The StorageMojo take
I love movies. I have a collection of over 600 DVDs. I’ve bought a dozen DVDs in the last week alone and I’ve never bought a bootleg DVD. With the average HD movie file size 3000x that of the average MP3, it isn’t terribly likely I would any time soon, even if I could.

The movie industry’s challenge is to create content so compelling and priced so reasonably that the huge majority of the audience has no interest in pirate copies. Yes, there will always be revenue lost to pirates. The cure: give people a good product, reasonably priced and convenient. That, not encryption, is the long term solution.

Alert reader Wes Felter sent in this great link to an article describing the HD-DVD AACS systems. Well worth a scan! Naturally, I commented on the article in the comments section. Thanks, Wes!

Comments welcome, as always.

I’m still on a light posting schedule until next year but this was too choice to ignore.

In a front page article today, (available online, but subscription required) the Wall Street Journal details a medical records horror story.

A middle-aged woman’s fiance commits suicide. For that and other reasons she decides to move across the country taking a job in a new firm. Her hiring boss leaves, she doesn’t get along very well with the new boss, has sleep problems. She talks to a sleep center psychologist about the turmoil of her last few years after being assured her comments are confidential.

Of course, it turns out they aren’t.

Then, in 2001, she was rear-ended at a red light. When she later sought disability benefits for chronic back pain, her insurer turned her down, citing information contained in her psychologist’s notes. The notes, her insurer maintained, showed she wasn’t too injured to work.

But wait, there’s more!
Another horror story: the bill collector can see your medical history!

Dawn Ross, a 37-year-old Los Angeles hairstylist, says she was startled to discover how much a bill collector knew about her. Federal rules permit the release of medical records in connection with “payment.” Soon after Ms. Ross returned home from an uninsured hospital stay, the hospital’s collection agency began dunning her for $8,600. When she disputed the bill, she learned that the agency had detailed records about her miscarriage and the treatment she received for it.

Special!

Complaints: 23,896; Enforcement actions: 0
It turns out that under the federal rules:

The rules also do not require patient permission for the release of records for “health-care operations,” a broadly defined category that includes some marketing, data warehouses and fund-raisers. John Metz, chairman of JustHealth . . . says he has encountered patients who were diagnosed with borderline diabetes — then inundated with marketing materials . . . from their medical providers.

How thoughtful and caring!

OK, medical privacy is a sick joke. Now what?
As I noted earlier this month (see Help Wanted: Storage Leadership Position Open) the storage industry needs to show some leadership if they want Americans to buy into electronic medical records. This is a win for everyone: improved medical care, lower costs and a huge storage market.

So I’ll say it again:
Medical records are one of the biggest storage opportunities of the next decade - if Americans can be persuaded they are secure. Right now they aren’t, and with the continuing stories about lost laptops and illegal data access, there is no reason for people to get comfortable. Without public support electronic medical record systems are dead and millions of Americans will suffer from medical delay and even death.

EMC, with their recent acquisition of RSA, would seem best positioned to take on the challenge of creating, in conjunction with system integrators, truly secure medical record storage systems. HP, who is as big as IBM, is much less visible in this space even though their big storage business stands to gain the most.

Medical data security can never be solely a storage problem. Yet storage vendors have a huge vested interest is seeing that this problem gets solved. Time to get off the sidelines, big guys. Do yourselves and your country proud.

The redoubtable Kevin Closson has a post entitled “Introducing the “Unstructured Data Administrator”. In it he refers to a study put out by the Independent Oracle Users Group called “Managing the Storage Equation: The Converging Roles of Data and Storage Professionals”. Very provocative title, which, sadly, the study doesn’t back up. But Kevin raises some very good questions.

Kevin also points to a Wikipedia article which quotes a Merrill Lynch study saying that 85% of all business data is unstructured. Clicking down the rabbit hole one comes to a website, sponsored by IBM, on something called UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture).

OK, 15% of your data is managed professionals, and the 85% is ???
Several threads here.

• My reading of the IOUG study is that DBAs have no idea what is happening with unstructured data, which doesn’t bode well for the putative convergence of data and storage professionals
• If only 15% of business data is in relational databases, and some presumably larger amount is in email, why is such a high percentage of business data kept on the most costly, high-performance storage?
• IBM’s UIMA working group is co-led by DARPA, which, given its history with TIA, is probably putting the technology to work to spy on US citizens, in addition to its use in the MADCAT program for tactical foreign language document translation.

Another losing battle for IT?
A simple and persuasive narrative of the IT/LOB fight over the last 50 years is that IT loses every time. IT’s high-volume command-and-control mindset meets business unit needs for ad hoc tools, and after much techie mumbo-jumbo, IT is forced to concede that making money is more important than saving money.

If the combination of expensive DBAs, expensive storage and expensive DBMS rises on to the CFO’s radar, changes will occur. It will take some years, but the target will be too fat to ignore. How the dollar split will shake out over time is anyone’s guess. Oracle will be saying “we’ve automated managment and use cheap storage, buy us!”; EMC will say “we can make any bloated pig of a mismanaged database scream, buy us!”; and DBA’s will be saying “we optimize for the real world in real time, buy us!” They’ll all get whacked, and I’d guess storage the most and DBA’s the least.

The StorageMojo take
Thanks, Kevin, for pointing out the growth and importance of unstructured data. It suggests more reasons for the coming hard landing in data storage.

Comments welcome, of course.

OK, executives at EMC, HP, IBM and Microsoft, do you really want to make a difference for your company, your fellow citizens and your country? Here’s your chance. It won’t be easy or quick, but if you are as good as you want us to believe, here’s your chance to prove it.

American health care needs you
Non-Americans may not believe this, and it is a fact Americans prefer to ignore, but America’s largest industry, health care ($2 trillion a year), is, objectively, a fiasco. Americans spend close to double what other industrialized countries do, and we rank in the bottom quartile for life expectancy and infant mortality. More money, worse results.

Naturally, big commercial interests are sluicing hundreds of billions into their pockets every year under this system. In return they pour huge amounts of “campaign contributions” - bribes - into our Ebay on the Potomac, the United States Congress - America’s only native criminal class, in the immortal words of Mark Twain.

So exactly how does storage fit into this mess?
I’m getting to that. A little more background first. In America, by historical accident, health care is attached to one’s job. No job, or a bad job, no health insurance. Health care is a major expense for American employers. For example, US automobile companies ascribe their financial woes to the cost of health insurance. Costs are high so there is always pressure to shift them somewhere else. People with health problems or sick children get fired. Insurance companies refuse to pay or underpay for care. Providers choose cheap short term palliatives over more expensive long-term solutions. And medical bills are the single largest cause of personal bankruptcy. The financial pressures are immense.

Americans know that their medical records can and will be used against them. In response, Ebay Congress passed a law, HIPAA, that promised federal protection for medical records. This law hasn’t been enforced, so public confidence is electronic medical records is in danger of collapsing.

The paradox is that, as the National Academy of Sciences has noted

Both private- and public-sector groups have identified the need to move forward expeditiously with the automation of clinical information.

Yet

Public opinion polls conducted during the last decade document high and increasing levels of concern about privacy, raising questions about whether people’s fear of violations of their privacy may lead some to forego seeking necessary health services or to withhold personal information from clinicians.

These aren’t illusory issues as the VA hospitals have demonstrated. In a New England Journal of Medicine peer-reviewed paper documenting today’s high quality of VA care, the authors noted that critical process improvements

. . . such as an integrated, comprehensive electronic medical-record system, were instituted at all VA medical centers.

OK, storage geeks, your time is now
There is bipartisan agreement that electronic medical-record systems are a major element in improving American medical care. And that means storage, lots of storage. So why aren’t more storage vendors involved?

To be fair, IBM is involved as a systems integrator and as leader of one of four consortia developing prototypes for a national health information network. Sun and Microsoft are participants in one of the other consortia, yet storage doesn’t appear to be their focus.

The StorageMojo take
Medical records are one of the biggest storage opportunities of the next decade - if Americans can be persuaded they are secure. Right now they aren’t, and with the continuing stories about lost laptops and illegal data access, there is no reason for people to get comfortable. Without public support electronic medical record systems are dead and millions of Americans will suffer from medical delay and even death.

EMC, with their recent acquisition of RSA, would seem best positioned to take on the challenge of creating, in conjunction with system integrators, truly secure medical record storage systems. HP, who is as big as IBM, is much less visible in this space even though their big storage business stands to gain the most.

Medical data security can never be solely a storage problem. Yet storage vendors have a huge vested interest is seeing that this problem gets solved. Time to get off the sidelines, big guys. Do yourselves and your country proud.

Comments welcome as always.

Update: another facet of this issue is covered in Medical Privacy Is A Sick Joke.

The big day for the new e-discovery Federal Rules of Civil Procedure has arrived and it’s Gold Rush time for e-discovery vendors. This morning’s Associated Press report quoted a somewhat dubious source, James Wright ” . . . director of electronic discovery at Halliburton Co. . . . There are hundreds of “e-discovery vendors” and these businesses raked in approximately $1.6 billion in 2006, Mr. Wright said. That figure could double in 2007, he added.”

Given the hearings and possible lawsuits coming Halliburton’s way over their lavish Iraq reconstruction contracts, maybe he knows more than I think. “The backup tapes were lost in a mortar attack” is certainly better than “my dog ate them,” but still, who’s going to believe them?

Don’t panic, just yet.
StorageMojo.com has written about e-discovery (see Sto’Mo’s 3 Minute Guide to Electronic Discovery and E-Discovery: Sizing the, Um-m, Opportunity and has some disagreements with some of the vendors. In my view it would be nuts for IT to take on sole responsibility for records management and e-discovery: don’t most CIOs have enough risks to manage already? You need one that could land you behind bars just so you feel alive?

Here’s a good place to scare yourself - or your boss - silly
Some of the lawyers at legal mega-firm Preston Gates (and yes, that is Bill G’s grand daddy) have put together a e-discovery blog that covers the latest legal decisions in the burgeoning field of e-discovery. Some recent highlights:

• “Court Grants Access to Individual Plaintiff’s Work and Home Computers; Plaintiff Had Continued Deleting Potentially Relevant Emails for Years After Commencing Litigation” - tsk, tsk. A very bad idea, Mr. Plaintiff.
• “Court Orders Production of Handwritten Worksheets Underlying Database, in Light of Demonstrated Data Entry Errors” - this is part of a case growing out of New York police suppression of protesters at the Republican National Convention in 2004.
• “Plaintiff’s Efforts to Preserve and Produce Email and Electronic Records Were Untimely and Inadequate; Court Invites Motion for Sanctions” - in this case the Spanish government is in hot water for not preserving documents needed for the case.

Under the scary headlines though is a fairly simple principle: judges get really peeved if they think someone is playing games with evidence.

The StorageMojo take
As with any new rules there will be a sorting out period of several years over what the rules mean, and another sorting out period over the best practices for complying with the rules. IT professionals will want the help and support of their company’s legal counsel and records management professionals, in writing. And don’t lose the documents.

Comments welcome of course.

In last week’s episode of Privacy Carve Out, Vaporstream promised to allow us to create, send and receive untrackable, unforwardable and disappearing email. This week the mavens at Xerox PARC announce they’ve developed a prototype technology that ensures that printed content diasappears within 24 hours. Just like thermal paper, except you don’t have to leave it out in the sun or in a parked car.

The immortal words of the Bard vs. the mortal words of you
Here’s an excerpt of the announcement, which shows just how wrong very smart people can get the implications of their creativity.

TORONTO and PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 27, 2006 — Xerox Corporation (NYSE:XRX) scientists have invented a way to make prints whose images last only a day, so that the paper can be used again and again. The technology, which is still in a preliminary state, blurs the line between paper documents and digital displays and could ultimately lead to a significant reduction in paper use.

The experimental printing technology, a collaboration between the Xerox Research Centre of Canada and PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Inc.), could someday replace printed pages that are used for just a brief time before being discarded. . . .

Xerox has filed for patents on the technology, which it calls “erasable paper.” It is currently part of a laboratory project that focuses on the concept of future dynamic documents.

Folks, who is going to bother to feed wrinked, dog-eared paper back into a printer to guarantee a paper jam? The real benefit here is privacy, that increasingly scarce commodity in a world of ever cheaper storage.

You will have privacy when we want you to have privacy
Authoritarians drool at the thought of ransacking every nook and cranny of our lives in search of illegal, embarrassing or déclassé behavior. Even America, Home of the Free, has several Supreme Court justices who believe that privacy is a gift of government, not an inherent right. “Sure, you have liberty. We’ll just make sure everyone knows what you do with it. Bwa-ha-ha!”

Until the Government needs privacy
Of course, in matters of national security, the government sees the need for all kinds of privacy, especially when disclosure reveals stupid, corrupt or morally repugnant behavior. Or, the software powering our very expensive defense systems (see Quick Disk Erase: Harder Than You Think).

The StorageMojo.com take
Two data points don’t make a trend, yet in a world with cheap massive storage and public network-based behavior, meaningful privacy will cease to exist unless we take pains to preserve it. Human frailty and hypocrisy being what they are, this means a high-growth privacy industry for the next several decades. Ultimately we all face governments, companies, competitors and acquaintances who may want to use information to hurt us or our families. Carving out privacy in our brave new digital world will take decades of controversy and pain.

Comments welcome, of course. Moderation turned on to keep comment spam at bay.