I bought the last two units left at any HD for a few hundred miles; drove them up there Monday.

Apparently my friend had to drive in and out of his (utterly destroyed) neighborhood in Swannanoa because it required the app and cell service to set up. And when they returned home it wouldn't work. Took multiple trips back and forth to get it usable in the area where it was actually needed.

Then of course the Helene intro deal requires an extensive form to fill out, so he just paid for it.

And, incrementally, we all give our money to another publicly funded, government protected, privately held monopoly. And yet... it's charity.

Anyway, the entire neighborhood is using it to coordinate resources to dig out their holler. So hey, she'll do for now.

How is it publicly funded and government protected?

> privately held monopoly

That's a weird complaint, would it be somehow better if it were a publicly held monopoly like Google, Amazon or Microsoft.

And what can SpaceX do to ensure Starlink is not a monopoly? Stop providing service and shut it down?

They have been even launching competitors satellites for them.

My grandfather became a Navy navigator, B25s I think, right as the war ended. Chased hurricanes in the Pacific. I was the only person in the family to ever get much out of him about it in the last years before he passed.

Even in peacetime operations, he watched many colleagues die in storms, fog, and from accidents. I think everyone who served then saw how arbitrary death could be, and how the entire service was designed to operate around the necessary assumption that lives would vanish for nothing - and that everything else had to keep humming along.

Provides a very different perspective than the modern era.

I can't speak for every agency (there are more than 100 Federal agencies with sworn officers and arrest authority, and thousands of state and local agencies), but the few times I did this in the early 2000s, even most of the HN crowd would have thought it reasonable.

I was an officer in the Coast Guard and had LE powers under two different branches of law - one public safety and one criminal. When Bad Things happened on federal waterways, my job was to first investigate threats to public safety. This comes with the power to issue a subpoena. This means we can 'compel speech' and then if you lie to us, you are in trouble.

This has more to do with what you might think the NTSB or FAA might do following an accident. The government has the right under current law to understand threats to the public. If a shipping company is currently doing something that could dump a barge full of Xylene into the bayou next to an elementary school (this is not a made up scenario, and you should look up Xylene) then there is a public interest compelling enough that we can tell people they have to sit down and tell us the truth, and the 4th amendment is not a barrier.

However, if a public safety investigation moves past 'understanding if something is a risk to the public', and individual criminal culpability appears possible, we are then required to disclose to the individuals involved that we have moved to a criminal investigation. In this case, the 4th comes back in play and warrants are required.

For me, this really only came up a couple times with individuals involved in an accident that were either using medical prescriptions ("I missed my medications, I'm not drunk") to delay us investigating a scene. Or, for a couple of injured mariners who were in the hospital at the time we showed up. We needed to go to the hospital get their version of the story and to confirm an injury; grave injuries would increase the 'level' and thus mandatory resources involved in an investigation. Also, we would need to get a witness testimony from a deckhand or something that was on a boat or facility and saw what happened (did the boat really slam into the terminal coupling or did the guy just mess up attaching it because he wasn't an officially trained Tankerman who shouldn't have been operating the equipment).

Being in the hospital or at the doctors was an excuse used more than once my companies trying to slow down inquiry into their mistakes. And yes, I think for our use case, it was completely reasonable for us to be able to call the hospital and ask "was so and so admitted last night?", just for us to find out that they were not, and went back home to mom's house to hide under orders from their captain.

Anyway, with all that said, it seems unlikely these powers are not frequently abused, even if most of the LEO community is just trying to do their job. So, tin-hat away, friends.

The third-party doctrine has become far too broad. There are so many situations where people share information with a third party, but also expect and deserve a right to privacy regarding that information. The fact that HIPAA doesn't provide a reasonable expectation of privacy in information shared with your doctor/pharmacist is just absurd. The law does explicitly carve out these LEO exemptions, but reasonable expectation of privacy is a constitutional right, and those carve-outs should be deemed unconstitutional. And we should extend those lines with good privacy laws all around - any information that a company is required to protect under civil privacy laws should also be exempt from the third-party doctrine and require a warrant.

I've helped get a number of tech companies HIPAA compliant, so I've become very familiar with the workings and requirements of the act. My wife, a nurse, works in medical claim management. Lots of healthcare knowledge between us.

I've had some very interesting conversations with her because of a tool she's described being used by insurance companies: medical canvassing. It's an "interesting" tool used by investigators that doesn't technically request PHI, but can paint a picture of one's past medical care.

Basically, an investigator can ask a health care provider a bunch of yes/no questions - "did the patient receive care between $DATE1 and $DATE2?" "yes" "was the patient treated for $THING_RELEVANT_BUT_UNRELATED_TO_CLAIM?" "yes" "okay, thank you, that's all we needed." No "PHI" requested, none provided, but a picture still painted... and HIPAA allows for it.

I'm very curious to know what other interesting methods exist that allow for the circumvention of patient privacy.

How is that not PHI? You asked for treatment information and it was provided. Asking it roundabout way doesn't sidestep HIPAA.

Contact in profile if willing to chat.

I think the point of this article is actually being elided over some by the conversation here though; it appears that these agencies are largely following the law. The question is, how broad should the reach of LE go given their legitimate authority?

In the current scenario, should a LEO from Idaho be allowed to see prescription records from a pharmacy in California? Should they have the right to get data from CVS about things that didn't happen in Idaho? Every prescription ever? Every doctors note?

The law as it stands allows states to determine the reproductive rights of their citizens and investigate violations thereof (note that I don't agree with the law, or the Supreme Court here). I think the question being raised by this letter is, what breadth of access should some Sheriff have over your medical records, and really, what the heck is even going on with this now?

The Dobbs case has opened up a new frontier of potential abuse, and I think the letter and article are appropriately exploring that frontier.

> Being in the hospital or at the doctors was an excuse used more than once my companies trying to slow down inquiry into their mistakes. And yes, I think for our use case, it was completely reasonable for us to be able to call the hospital and ask "was so and so admitted last night?", just for us to find out that they were not, and went back home to mom's house to hide under orders from their captain.

Just because it made your job easier doesn't mean that it was legitimate. Constitutional rights, privacy laws, and case law have been created specifically to limit police power. Yes, it would be easier if cops didn't need warrants at all. No, that is not a valid argument for bypassing them.

Similarly - yes, it's common for LEOs to talk to witnesses to try and get them to incriminate themselves, either by engaging them in interactions that don't legally require a Miranda warning or by ignoring Miranda requirements altogether (which happens frequently). That doesn't justify it, either legally or ethically.

> Anyway, with all that said, it seems unlikely these powers are not frequently abused, even if most of the LEO community is just trying to do their job.

The assumption that "most LEOs are just trying to do their job" is itself questionable, given how much documentation there is of systemic abuse of police power. Even if it weren't, that isn't a valid defense when the government has explicitly placed restraints on the ways LEO can do their job (to say nothing of the broader question of the legitimacy of that job in the first place).

So, I suppose that the main point. In these cases, we weren't investigating the individual as a suspect, we were trying to understand the nature of an incident that could affect the safety of others in a relatively linear fashion.

Imagine it's 20 years ago, there's no cameras everywhere, GPS is limited to multi-meter precision - did the 50-barge tow coming down the Mississipi river with millions of tons of cargo hit the interstate bridge broadside or did it just scrape it? There's a big pylon-shaped dent in the side of a naptha barge with cement dust on it, but the captain swears he just glanced it with the grain barge at the head of the tow. It's ancient and looks like it's battered 100 docks in the past year.

So, Mr. Deckhand, what hit the bridge?

In this scenario, he is not responsible for navigating the vessel, so we assume that it's unlikley that this would evolve into an investigation that would jeopardize him. And thus are free to issue a subpoenea if needed to find out if we need to shut down the only passage over the Mississippi for 100 miles.

I think it's fair that the public has the right to his honesty in this scenario.

Of course, these powers present the potential for abuse, and I'm sure it happens. Just not in the world I ever operated in; our powers and obligations were taken very seriously internally.

That doesn't matter. You're still talking about accessing private, sensitive data about an individual.

> I think it's fair that the public has the right to his honesty in this scenario.

Yes, and that's exactly why warrants exist. The courts are specifically responsible for determining the outcome of cases in which private rights potentially conflict with public ones (or with private rights of other parties).

> Of course, these powers present the potential for abuse, and I'm sure it happens. Just not in the world I ever operating in; our powers and obligations were taken very seriously internally.

Having worked extensively in this area, I'll be blunt and say: anytime someone who works in law enforcement says that there are no abuses of power in their workplace, that means either they were so oblivious that they never saw abuses that are occurring around them, or they were so mired in the system that they are incapable of recognizing the abuses of power that they themselves are participating in.

Out of charity, I'll assume the former. But to be honest, every time I've spoken at length about this with LEOs, it's inevitably turned out to be the latter.

I am sure this is often true at the local LE level. But remember, they deal almost entirely with criminal investigations about individuals for things that do not present a broader risk to the public (beyond their continued individual behavior).

In our case, we are not reifying 'the drug menace' to a public level; we are trying to find out if a barge is full of vegetable oil or an explosive polymerization agent. And in those cases, no, I don't think your rights to privacy supersede our obligation to understand if there's a major threat to other people.

> That doesn't matter. You're still talking about accessing private, sensitive data about an individual.

This is true and I can assure you I know quite a bit about what can be in people medical records (I am a MD who has worked extensively in medical records exchange and machine learning). I don't think accessing this kind of data should be possible without genuine need.

> Yes, and that's exactly why warrants exist.

In our case at least, warrants wouldn't even make sense. We were not conducting criminal investigations and asking for access to pursue a person against their will, in response to a crime. We were trying to find out about near-term threats to other people.

I think you and I probably agree on the spirit here - it's just that in our case (and cases like the NTSB or FAA) there are compelling public interests that supersede someones right to privacy. Finding out if you were prescribed benzos so I can charge you for some garbage possession misdemeanor is not one; finding out if there's 30,000 barrels of explosive leaking under a highway is.

No?

Nothing you have said, in this comment or in the rest of the thread, refutes the point that warrants are the mechanism by which the legal system intermediates this power. It's quite telling that even in a completely constructed example chosen for the discussion at hand, you're not actually making a case that cops need access to people's medical information without a warrant.

> I think you and I probably agree on the spirit here - it's just that in our case (and cases like the NTSB or FAA) there are compelling public interests that supersede someones right to privacy.

No, I'm saying that it is literally not your job as a member of law enforcement to decide when the public interest "supersedes" someone's right to privacy. That's what a judge is for. That's why warrants exist.

  there are compelling public interests that supersede someones right to privacy.

> No?

No.

I would be 100% fine with stripping that group of this discretion, sanctioning them, and sending them back to the drawing board on how to "understand the nature of incidents that could affect the safety of others", aka investigate.

For example, maybe your concern is just how fast and recklessly a boat was going with the goal of figuring out if they are a threat to fresh into another boat, but maybe the person doesn’t want to open themselves up for Boating Under the Influence or Controlled Substances Act criminal charges (whether or not they are legally guilty).

5th amendment self-incrimination protections apply even in compelled congressional testimony and routine tax return filing obligations, which are definitely not criminal investigations.

4th amendment protections also apply well beyond the criminal context, although I can well believe that your public safety investigations may have fallen into a judicially recognized exception. For a legally very clear example, no law can constitutionally authorize an LEO to nonconsensually conduct a warrantless suspicionless search of someone’s home to see if they might have failed to pay any applicable taxes or duties on any imported cigarettes which they may happen to have present there.

(Emphasis on suspicionless - the legal answer would probably be very different if the LEO sees someone transporting a pallet of imported cigarettes from the home into a truck in their driveway following having received a tip from the FedEx customs clearance people, even if there’s no time for a warrant. But there’s no constitutional reason for any investigation like this, whether about criminally intentional tax evasion or merely noncriminal accidental tax underpayment, to be occurring without suspicion.)

With changing landscape of laws related to things like abortion and transgender rights, people are rightly worried that a zealous prosecutor in one state will subpoena for records of things like abortion drugs or hormone blockers, and use that data to start harassing or prosecuting people.

It sounds like it would be feasible for a prosecutor to ask for a list of all patients currently prescribed hormone blockers and then open child welfare cases against all those families across an entire state.

I mostly trust that something running in a VM is not accessible or abused when I sign a contract - I just don't want to use 30 SaaS services that require me to allow data consumption from me and my customers.

Can you compare Proxmoc to just running small VMs or a container on a bare-metal hosting provider?

However, Proxmox provided a 'framework' that seemed superior:

- Having ZFS as a filesystem to easily revert to a previous state [1] [2]

- Makes possible using docker within an additional 'security layer' (LXC)

- Having easy integrated backup and restore

- Being scalable, if I had to

- Not focussing 'fancy new technologies' (k8s, etc.), but established ones (qemu, LXC)

[1]: https://pilabor.com/series/proxmox/restore-virtual-machine-v...

[2]: https://xai.sh/2018/08/27/zfs-incremental-backups.html

Hope is that I can do the heavy lifting of getting things up and have something stable enough for me to run and a manager to be able to log in and see, at most.

In a small business I like having different networks for different things.

A few small stacks which are less likely to topple or do as much damage.

Somewhat like chemical processing, a few PC's might actually be "money-making machines" such as running a process-control app. These can be even more mission-critical than the highly secure office machines dedicated to accounting, or invoicing, or other financial work. If you have tech ability you will likely be better off mastering this hands-on before deciding whether or when to turn it over to an employee or contractor. OTOH an MBA without tech ability would probably be better off hiring an engieeer for process control from the beginning. You will probably want these PCs to never come anywhere near the internet. Highly amenable to physical security measures. Before you can rest, everything will need to be proven reliable around-the-clock without remote access over the long term anyway. This part should be just fine with a few miles of air gap theoretically, even if it's actually in the same bulding as the office machines. For this I also keep spare PC's of the proper vintage as well as pre-cloned HDDs and SSDs along with the spare mission-critial parts for the process equipment itself. No more trouble than it ever was.

About those office machines, to me these are the ones that replaced typewriters & copiers, calculators, spreadsheets and filing cabinets. Run-of-the-mill stuff where each typical user's desk has equivalent fundamental capablities. You still have to decide traditionally how you want to separate financial from non-financial desks, and different departments like Engineering and Customer Service, so I would at least end up with more than one net or subnet here.

Then there's the "internet machines". These are the ones that to an extent replaced snailmail, company libraries, faxes, phone calls, and in-person meetings. The communication lines which only ever really need to hold or handle a very small fraction of your entire data and perhaps only during the times you actually could designate for data exchange. This could reduce your exposure to electronic compromise quite a bit.

Each of these networks has dramatically different administration needs and I just don't think it's good enough to simply have two monitors on each desk, so I have at least two PC's, each with a monitor but only one with an internet connection and it really doesn't look that much different than anybody else. It's not like I have to purchase twice an many PC's for an entire skyscraper full of employees.

Traditionally, without secretarial services, if you gave someone a desk without both a phone and a typewriter, nobody ever expected that person to be as productive as possible.

It also makes sense to separate the different administrative needs, security considerations, and replacement & upgrade cycles from the begining in a way that they could be turned over to various trusted employees or organizations at different times as things evolve.

At some point for visitors I would have a completely different ISP for them alone.

Interestingly, the most common thing I have heard from folks who run (successful and failed) breweries is "no one can tell the difference between beers, build a place people want to drink beer".

I am doing that by starting with an awesome location - acquiring the building is the main reason I am doing this and it's pretty cool.

While the 'hacker' and 'privacy aware' crowds are pretty small, I would like to help be an inviting place for folks that share these interests. I am not sure how much I need to cater to that, but I'd like to be as good an actor as reasonable time tradeoffs will allow.

I am totally willing to put up with a learning curve, if that overhead can get me to a stable place that's better for data management than just saying 'I give up', in the face of a large ecosystem.

Re: Nextcloud - heard of it many times but never used it. Can a normal person (think bartender) log in and edit a document or respond to a calendar invite on a phone? What output does it generate (.odts, .caldav)?

Never heard of Odoo but thanks, I'll go down that rabbit hole.

- How many people in your area care about digital privacy?

- How many of them drink craft beer?

- How many of them would consider a brewery's digital tools when deciding on a place to drink?

My hunch is that the number at the end of that funnel is going be very close to zero. Putting money into a nerdy trivia night would have 100x the impact with 1% of the headaches.

I agree - we'll do a fair amount of that stuff. From trivia night to the knitting club, I'd like to be a 'Third Place' for people to have fun.

I just wonder, if I host the monthly Python meetup, will anyone care besides me? I personally don't shop or eat at places that don't accept cash, require an app, or only allow online takeout orders - but that's not everybody by a long shot.

I'd assume the average person, even one who cares about data privacy, would never expect a brewery to also be mindful of this stuff. I do wonder (hope, irrationally?) that some of the local (NC Triangle area) tech community will at least find it to be of some note.

Sounds like a lot of fun!

> will anyone care besides me? I personally don't shop or eat at places that don't accept cash, require an app, or only allow online takeout orders - but that's not everybody by a long shot.

FWIW, I've been a dev for 10 years and have met many tech people -- I don't think I've met anyone IRL who would take that stance. Lots of people who notice that kind of stuff and wish it were better, but not to the level of buy/not buy.

Just a bit of anecdata for you ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Bing maps shows barriers, google shows a clear road. Apparently the barriers had been removed.

Normally I view these sorts of incidents with a lot of cynicism, but if you look at the road from street view, I can see how this would happen eventually.