This case is making it’s way through the U.S. Courts. It started in Florida where the District Court ruled against the students. Now it’s at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Some heavy hitting First Amendment lawyers are weighing in on this one for the students.
Last year this case became a topic for discussion with our daughter who was participating in ‘Clinicals’ related to her academic nursing program. No one at the table had a JD or Bar card so the following recollections of those conversations don’t mean much except what got said in one circle.
Perhaps it was foolish of us to expect the case rested on gender discrimination, medical privacy and would be quickly resolved. The freespeech and consent arguments raised support the conclusions we’d come to though court rules limit Appeals to arguments raised the first go around. So don’t look for any legal briefs focused on our table talk for this case.
I don’t know if that class or college also teaches rectal ultrasound but it seems like a safe assumption. If it turns out they do not that’s okay since the underlying argument of gender discrimination isn’t dependent on a comparison of forcing male students to undergo a prostate exam in the same conditions or with the same refusal consequences.
Gender Equality is a myth…all bodies are not created equal. If the college gave extra credit to female students voluntarily submitting their vagina as a superior teaching tool to the anatomical dummies available male students would claim they were not allowed the same academic opportunities. Male students at risk of failing the class or losing GPA dependent funding would claim it wasn’t their fault they weren’t born with factory original or aftermarket lady bits. Okay no extra credit, nor consequences. Gender Equality is a myth, Equal Rights treatment, respect etc. shouldn’t be.
Forcing a female student to submit to a vaginal ultrasound exam in a classroom violates medical privacy rights. Students do not waive their right to medical privacy because they have a body part their professor prefers to the inanimate teaching materials available. There is no client/provider privacy in the classroom setting. From the court documents it seems this professor would insist any medical reason a student would use to justify refusal would be an invitation to insist the class not be deprived of the opportunity. Ooh you’re pregnant…lets get that cervix on the screen. Post abortion? undiagnosed cancer, genital warts etc are all exciting anomalies for students.
These students are buying an education in process and practical knowledge to prepare them for actual patient care. If Valencia College curriculum is teaching students bodily autonomy, consent and the right to privacy come second to a hands on classroom exercise; who’s teaching these students to respect patients rights?
11 Responses
The onus is on the idiots involved in the court. Gender Equality, a myth you assume in this case, is like…fighting words and I’m not sure how to interpret that. Wasn’t entirely clear on your conclusion, is it that in this case, gender equality is a myth, or nation wide? Is your overall argument to increase awareness of how law treats privacy? Look at the FBI vs Apple case. Again, idiots. FBI either willfully, or out of ingnorance is asking something very fucking stupid. I do not know why the department of homeland security does not make a statement to the FBI I can only assume turf wars. Again, the problem is idiots, the system is flawed, but it is what we have. Good for you Lurking Reader to write this up and help us to understand it from this perspective. Skepticism is good for every body.
@Ivy
Fighting words? Do you mean triggering words?
My assertion is …for the purposes of teaching/learning use of a Transvaginal ultrasound a body without a vagina can not equal one with. The paragraph concludes “Gender Equality is a myth, Equal Rights treatment, respect etc. shouldn’t be.”
My intent was simply to share how things that seem obvious or simple to me are anything but obvious or simple. I don’t think anyone involved with case is an idiot, I think it took a lot of guts and moxie for the girls to pursue it and idiots don’t effectively defend lawsuits.
Which FBI v Apple case? NY just ruled against FBI, CA ..at this point only magic eight ball or crystal ball could predict when or how that plays out.
I know I wasn’t very specific, but I assumed the courts sided with the professor, and if that was the case, then the court is an idiot. Stupid stuff gets argued all the time.
“From the court documents it seems this professor would insist any medical reason a student would use to justify refusal would be an invitation to insist the class not be deprived of the opportunity.”
Excellent articles have been written in the past few days about the Apple vs FBI case, most people don’t seem to understand that what the FBI is asking is for Tech companies to write thier software (Code) to allow access for the government. It is not a one time thing, and there are many experts who say that it undermine our national security, Ash Carter included. “I don’t believe in backdoors”
The other thing that people don’t seem to understand is that there are plenty of ways to get into that phone, NSA included
@Ivy
No problem, lots of times i think I make sense…read response or reread next day & oops WTF!?
District court did rule for defendant. Idiotic stupid ruling if you ask me, still glad for a system that gives plaintiff a chance to overturn stupid rulings and bring friends to help persuade court on merits of case.
Was solid on tech till about ten years ago….Now It isn’t even like a visit to old neighborhood. From a policy standpoint the San Bernardino case is a huge can of worms. Employer either provided or paid for the phone so lots of folks are wondering what kind of agreement existed between them. Social media is all hot on shooters rights assuming he didn’t waive them, company’s are reviewing policy to see if their proprietary stuff is at risk if a work provided/paid device is used by someone accused of a crime that makes FBI want to look deeper than stuff stored on cloud as things stand now & freaking out about how to deal if FBI gets their way.
bear with me cuz yeah tech me ROFLMAO
Gist of convo. IT dept relies on device operating system to thwart hackers, IT dept adds software to restrict settings like maxing inactivity at one minute before PW needed, device overwrites or erases after too many PW attempts and any attempt to jailbreak?? Alter the safeguards?? …Turns device into a brick.
None of their critical stuff is stored in the cloud or on apps you’d find in the AppStore, some devices the only stuff that goes to cloud is user music, pics and stuff you’d find on Facebook. FBI wants to get around features the company uses to make sure access is restricted to authorized people even if it means losing the critical data and turning device into brick.
If I’m close FBI is asking for drill to supplement existing Master keys to every safety deposit box locked in every dual controlled vault to get around losing the key to box 247? That’s not a back door that’s whoa! ripping roof off cuz they knocked and no one answered back door…that’s not borrowing a cup of sugar & NFW is tossing a tarp over roof gonna do crap to keep elements out…if that’s it then I totally get why the IT guys knickers are all wadded. Either way eyes are glazed over, time to open some wine to clear Em up.
@lurkingreader My exp with computers is almost life long, so I get the gist of it but I am not a security expert, I do read consistently though. When I was 6, pops was nice enough to get Bernstein Bears learning games on floppy and taught me to C://cd to get to my video game. That being said, I know your legal mind will love this link I got for ya:
https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2016/03/03Amicus-Briefs-in-Support-of-Apple.html
Amicus briefs been filed in opposition to FBI, also someone on the court side is doing research for opposite on encryption to figure out what the hell it’s all about.
It’s easiest to think of this way. Every single device you use whether it be your smartphone, your computer or (other wireless device like printers) are vulnerable to some sort of attack. That’s just the way the internet was built, and originally built by DoD. But those folks at DoD are not very creative, or at least they couldn’t imagine how their science bullient/forums would transform the world. Anyways…
Everything you do online is traceable. Everything is attackable. Just because that’s….point A to point B. Now if you stick to letters and what not people can still come in and steal your stuff.
Anything sent from Computer A or Computer B can be intercepted. Digital data goes through nodes/servers (the internet is actually series of cables buried under ground).
Ok so we’re talking about anybody Joe blow or corporate suit, well…all that applies. U can google PRISM but it’s may not be worth your time, it’s mostly LOL of course it is.
Now, every device has OS. Every digital thingy has code. Cuase that’s how computer’s talk to each other, in essence. Now code can be complex, malicious good, whatever. It’s just code. Code is not good or bad, it is what you do with it.
And what the FBI is asking for is bad, because A) They fucked up by resetting the password B) they don’t want to do hard work. They want it easy.
So instead of trusting techies and nerds/ they are trying to throw the book at em, cause they don’t trust em and “probally” don’t understand what they are asking.
They think an fair request is to have half the key on every device, and the government has the other key.
Cyber pathogen is a running joke also, you could google that but it’s a meme. Don’t worry about it.
Anyways. They are using the law written in the 1870’s something (George Washington All Writs) to compel the civilian industry, (Silicon valley if you will) to fuck every body over. Because see, the FBI doesn’t want to do the hard work. (they r actually trying to set legal precentdent) And the FBI is like shrug, lol but we will have the key first, before China and Russia so its ok.
And then the IT guys are like, “man you are so fucking stupid”
So they are pushing back.
That’s basically the amicus brief.
The other thing is people try to make this a privacy thing. That’s all well and good because courts have ruled that code is free speech. However, the really important thing is if you have an iPhone and you are john doe civilain, big dick suit, or government man, you are totally fucked if the FBI gets what it wants.
I mean jesus H christ, the internet of things is closely becoming a reality,. soon your fucking toaster will be connected to the internet.
The simple thing is, they could go get the info they want. They probally already have it. Idk why they are being assholes and asking for something so stupid. I mean they work on cases like narcotics and they want to unlock bad people’s phones, who do criminal things. See and that’s good. They can keep doing that within the law.
But they are asking for something that Congress has already rejected/didn’t do anything with. So the guys over there, they’re not code monkeys, they are justice people with a really big stick. They should follow Ash Carter’s example of trying to work with silicon valley, (as in listening) instead of trying to give the IT guys a toilet swirly.
@Ivy
Lol…when I was 6 dad took us to his data processing business on weekends to earn allowance. my job was loading 3×7 punch cards into the slots, lining up ledger forms, brothers grunted boxes of cards to each machine, little sister took over job of unlocking courier bags and oldest got pushbroom duty after she blabbed a client worker’s weekly salary to his kid. Oldest brother used forklift to pull pallets down for younger brothers to grunt boxes off of. The computers used vacuum tubes bigger than me. Dad would change out tubes and toss them in the glass dumpster…
Your phone has more computing power than was contained in that entire warehouse. Then Monmouth University was a local college and dad’s students had to trek over to his warehouse to connect to the Internet for access to larger universities until the Computer Science building could be built.
“They are using the law written in the 1870’s something (George Washington All Writs) to compel the civilian industry, (Silicon valley if you will)”
“The other thing is people try to make this a privacy thing. That’s all well and good because courts have ruled that code is free speech”
Free speech as in the First Amendment? Sent out to the states for consideration in 1789 and adopted two years later with the Bill of Rights?
The U.S. Constition was created in 1787 batted around for ten years then adopted in 1788.
Silicon Valley named for Silica? Silica dust was easier to brush off clothes than straw or sawdust, using an empty 55gal silica barrel to roll each other around the warehouse was a guaranteed ass beating.
The Internet of things is the biggest threat to individuals right to privacy than any government ever in history. Wireless voice activated homes sound great till the reality that no wireless or connected device is truly secure starts sinking in.
Home show had a tech house complete with a ‘secure stand alone’ closet safe in the MBR. Biometrics just means the homeowner has to be home when the thief who cased the house via hacking wants what they have.
I don’t think the Apple case is about getting info from a dead guys phone.
@lurkingreader LOL generations of nerds raising generations of nerds. I can one up ya, kind sorta. Used to watch dad put computers together, looking at the pc mail order catalogs, grunting about saving money. Rarrrrrarrr bitch bitch, hey Ivy don’t touch anything inside this pc frame, your a GIRL. And then when disketts came around, it was such a big deal and then cds became a big deal…and were for those “rich people”. And it was pretty cool to read that the “first computers” were women with punch cards, who were good at math or something.
Haha. I’m pretty excited about Moore’s law not being broken yet, read some DoD news the new thing is biometric cloud computing, that’s a doozy. I suppose you could call more optimistic about how all this is going to work out. Eventually society as a whole is going to have decide how much their privacy is worth, for the free they are going to get. When is the infrastructure for the net going to change, that’s what I want to know. When internet comes from those big ole cables under ground to something new, something maybe inspired by science fiction.
2030-2050 is going to be a wild ride for 1st world democratic countries. Not so much for the poor ones with crazy, thug dictators, but I can almost guarantee it will bear some creativity out of the people who have to deal with that bullshit.
And on the flip side….copy paste below:
—————————————-
The Quantum Effects in Biological Environments (QuBE) program is laying the foundation for novel sensor designs by revealing that naturally occurring biological sensors leverage not only classical physics but quantum physical effects as well. Depicted is a cell membrane with a protein receptor that exploits quantum interactions to detect odor molecules. Research into natural chemical sensors like this cell made one can open opportunities to build artificial materials and
structures with life like sensing capabilities. /DARPA’s
Folded Non Natural Polymers with Biological Function (Fold F(x))
program aims to emulate the powers of nature’s own biological polymers, including DNA and proteins, using non natural, sequence dictated polymers built from lab created chemical units known as monomers. Shown is an illustration of a cell like factory churning out artificial protein like polymers. Among the potential payoffs of such technology could be medicines that treat maladies, such as cancer and autoimmune disorders, without side effects. / Integrated circuits traditionally have been a domain reserved for electrons, which course through exquisitely tiny transistors, wires and other microscopic structures where the digital calculations and data processing that underlie so much of modern technology unfold. Increasingly, however, chip designers have been acting on a long-ripening vision of enlisting photons instead of, or in tandem with, electrons in the operation of microprocessors. Photons, for one, can serve as fast-as-light carriers of information between chips, overcoming digital traffic jams that at times put the brakes on electrons. / Photons that hit cameras or sensors register light intensity and spectral information. But those photons could have come from different light sources. As they go through the environment, they are bouncing off and interacting with all sorts of surfaces, she said.
“By the time they get to that sensor, they have actually had these rich and full lives,” Prabhakar said.
REVEAL will see if sensors can capture much more of the information that those photons are bringing — time of arrival, angle of arrival and other characteristics — which may show what is behind an object, or be able to create 3D models of the scene, she said./ The new chip, which the researchers dubbed “Eyeriss,” could also help usher in the “Internet of things” — the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and task coordination. With powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms on board, networked devices could make important decisions locally, entrusting only their conclusions, rather than raw personal data, to the Internet. And, of course, onboard neural networks would be useful to battery-powered autonomous robots./ “Physicists have joked about how much more difficult their field would be if atoms or electrons had personalities, but that’s exactly the situation faced by social scientists,” he said. / If new tools and methods for harnessing virtual or alternate reality and massively distributed platforms could be developed and objectively validated, many of today’s most important and vexing challenges in social science—such as identifying the primary drivers of social cooperation, instability and resilience—might be made more tractable, with benefits for domains as broad as national security, public health, and economics.
@ivy
Wasn’t trying to one up you, was trying to convey that tech is new and really just starting to come head to head with threats and growing pains as an industry.
The guy who created email in 1971 just died. Twenty years before email was created a few universities were recruiting HS students with the potential to make an information ‘superhighway’ reality.
Eisenhower’s term in office is when the US interstate system was adopted. It was on the drawing board before we entered WWII. Interesting tidbit to how and when the yet to be named ‘internet’ was intended to be an ‘information’ superhighway.
thought we had this friendly banter going on, so I was just teasing you.
At this stage in the world, everything is a huge growing pain. Will probably be so for the foreseeable future, but I like where it’s going.
@lurkingreader u gonna like this guy https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177a406c775#.w2dfwxvk4
@ivy
Im too serious for my own good unless I’m lol at myself 🙂
Ross is right about programmers being paranoid, unbreakable phones will keep coming …and going.