Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Apology In Advance

Honey, I just want to apologize in advance for the coming time when the Department of Homeland Security kicks in our doors with drawn weapons, when they put a couple of nine millimeter slugs into our nine pound tabby because they feared for their safety, they haul off our myriad computers, and interrogate us for hours on end to prompt us to admit our non-existent guilt or plead guilty to unspecified charges because of what I did today. I didn't mean for it to turn out this way.

You see, honey, I went to the opthamologist's office today, and when they called me by my name, I followed the technician into an examination room. She hit me with the requisite salvo of eye drops that rendered me a nocturnal creature in the middle of the afternoon, and then she input my information directly into a workstation. Wow! What an advanced place! A workstation in every exam room! Then the technician told me that the doctor would be in shortly, and then she left the room. Without locking the workstation.

After the doctor saw me and assured me I would not need an eyepatch just yet, he asked if there was anything else. So of course I told him the lax security his enterprise offered, leaving patients alone with access to his computer network and his patient records was a very bad thing. He said that restarting the computer would take too long, and he'd have to cut the number of patients he saw in half--not explicitly stating his perceived dilemma of patient information security versus his bank account. He also said that sooner or later you have to trust people, and he trusts his patients wouldn't do anything like that. Hell, I trust people, but we lock the doors here in la casa Noggle even when we're home.

So I am sorry, baby. Because when some hacker, cracker, or whatever the bad man terms himself finds himself sitting in that chair while the doctor politely answers all of another patient's questions, this bad man will see what he can do. And if the bad man's not careful, someone will know that someone's been hacking the good doctor's computers, and the good doctor will remember one name was concerned with his security: Noggle.

So this will be the thanks I get for trying to spread a little cheerful-but-relevant paranoia into the non-technology fields. Maybe I'll get the lucky double whammy of having my personal information stolen, too. Of course, it's not clear what a bad man would do with my cornea thickness, and I surely didn't share my SSN with anyone unless I'm getting money from them.

Honey, I hope you can forgive me. And remember to do some off-site backup of your critical documents because we won't see those PCs again.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:18 PM