The story is that someone close to the situation leaked details in violation of HIPAA on an internet message board.
And from a correctional facility, no less. The whole thing is a mess.
edit: spelling
HIPAA would cover healthcare in prison. It wouldn't cover, say, what prison guards can talk about.
They may have other rules that indicate this is inappropriate, but HIPAA covers specific institutions, such as hospitals, medical personnel generally and health insurance. It doesn't actually cover anyone who ever learned anything about your health for some reason.
I generally had otherwise considered correctional facilities to be rather mum—but it's a little different here in Canada.
"Hey, we as medical professionals can't disclose your health info. But we have to keep these guards around for safety, who will hear everything, and they can say all they want!"
Why would you expect strict compliance with some dumb privacy law?
>And from a correctional facility, no less. The whole thing is a mess.
I don't really see the problem here. You can't expect adherence to the law, or even upholding of basic human rights, from a correctional facility in America. Just look at how migrants have been treated lately in "detention centers" (concentration camps).
As the other responder said, prison rape is treated as a hilarious joke in the US, and is condoned by correctional staff, so why would you expect adherence to HIPAA?
HIPAA
To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with anonymity on the internet. But anonymity on the internet, this story showing the value of that anonymity, and this relating the the mainstream media aren't at all related, at least in my mind. Mind clarifying?
As I see it, one can be anonymous on, say, twitter, which is still moderated, and therefore has (less) open organization of "far-right trolls and white nationalists". So its not clear to me what unique anonymity 4chan provides.
Twitter is an ultra short form platform that has already demonstrated political censorship. It also requires account verification through email and sometimes phone number. I don’t think it compares to 4chan for something like this.
Mainstream media is 30% Fox, by viewership, with most traditional publishers remaining trustworthy in most reporting. 4chan/8chan ties in with Daily Caller types too often to be of any value 99.9% of the time.
> Pepe, the green frog that has become a mascot for right-wing internet trolls.
Pepe was an ultra popular meme on 4chan when this was originally ran in the news. It is unsurprising that alt-right folks on 4chan were using it, since everyone else was too. But since the news ran, people on social media had to stop using it, lest they be associated with politics they despise; ordinary people who read the news and don’t live on the internet would not know the difference.
I am not keen on 4chan culture but if I had to guess I’d assume that merely posting Pepe on 4chan doesn’t signify political beliefs unless it’s a specific variant with for example, a MAGA hat.
Obviously this is a pretty exploitable pattern.
It used to be the other way around -- content originating on chans would be repeated and posted elsewhere on the internet, and the content itself usually had nothing to do specifically with chan culture. As media began progressively segregating chan culture from the rest of the internet, content from chans signified that the poster was also a user of chans. As the image of chans have evolved from being a place where you can post whatever you want (within legal limits) to being somehow a bastion of a minority political ideology, so too has the content shifted from being relatable by most everyone who uses the internet to being reviled because of it's ties to the sites.
I would not be surprised if a news article came out postulating that Richard Stallman had now become a symbol of the "alt-right"
All this is about is a HIPPA violation but I’m not sure why HIPPA would apply when the person is dead. How can you wrong a dead person? Are the dead still guaranteed privacy rights? Seems a bit odd to me.
Not like there's a shortage of 4chan-style people among law enforcement and probably related first responders.
> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Also because anybody can flag something for any arbitrary reason, regardless of what the rules say.
Regardless, glad to see this submission gaining steam and generating civil discussion as well.
Buzzfeed is worried about HIPAA violations. Good thing to worry about in general, but perhaps this is not the best case to champion that cause...
They could look into the type of plea deal he got previously and why he got it. Or, say, comb through all the recently unsealed evidence and compile a spreadsheet of who flew to his island and how often. Now, that would make some good investigative reporting.
Why wouldn’t one of them have just broken the news? Frankly I don’t see how it’s worse for them to break the news to 4chan than for the prison to break it to ABC news. He was dead and they announced it. Why does everything have to be “official”?
The idea that regular folks can disseminate true information on their own is very disturbing to a lot of people.
Because institutions, like the Bureau of Prison, Fortune 500 companies or your county school district, are responsible for how information is distilled to the public. That is why almost all are concerned about their image and invest heavily into public relations.
If people leaked information all the time from those institutions, then a certain level trust will be lost and could be detrimental.
I think it boils down to - can you reasonably catch illegal content being routed through your platform? 4chan, LiveLeak, WorldStar, ATS, and Twitter all have ways of doing this, 4chan's may be more crude because there are certain things you cannot do on 4chan because of the way the site is designed (for instance, webm's with sound are isolated to a few boards, so you lose a channel of communication when posting them outside of those boards, and you cannot upload documents directly except through labyrinthine methods, many users don't want to click a link and be taken to a different site so you lose that population, etc.), but it does the job to LE's standards. Many people hate it, but there is no benefit in taking it down because the culture would simply migrate elsewhere.
