The New Piracy: Personal Data Used “For Research” Without Consent
Today, you may listen to the third open, public meeting “to receive stakeholder input” held by the federal Commission on Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP). It’s being held all day in San Francisco. Just dial 800-857-4620 and use passcode 4837647#. The leader of the meeting is CEP Chair Katherine Abraham.
I’ve renamed the meeting “The New Piracy: Personal Data Used ‘For Research’ Without Consent”. It’s a far less boring title, and it’s closer to the truth of what’s actually being promoted in these meetings.
Previously, these hearings were livestreamed and posted on YouTube. I have not been told why that kind of transparency ended, but it did. If you want to read the messages of testifiers, rather than listening, here’s a link to presenters’ written testimonies. In contrast to so many other testifiers, Dr. Karen Effrem’s written testimony for today’s meeting makes sense to me. Here’s the link to hers and the others’: https://www.cep.gov/hearings/2017-02-09.html#presentations
Here’s an agenda link (that does not include the written-only submissions for today’s conference agenda): https://www.cep.gov/content/dam/cep/events/2017-02-09/2017-2-9-agenda.pdf
Why listen to a deadly boring, all-day meeting? Because I can hardly imagine a meeting with more power to influence the destruction of American children’s future liberties. Even though the CEP has only existed for less than a year, and was just created by Paul Ryan and a handful of other congressmen, it holds influential power with Congress over matters of data privacy, or the end thereof.
The CEP and the vast majority of its testifiers (business people and researchers) want the CEP to recommend to congress that state agencies (like school systems) and federal agencies (like the Social Security Administration and departments of the military and others) and other nongovernmental groups (that similarly collect personally identifiable information from citizens, en masse) should combine forces and data in a centralized “clearinghouse”.
The main issue of discussion seems to be whether to put such a clearinghouse under federal rule or under the rule of a consortium of universities.
Why the universities? –Because almighty research is the false god by which this movement justifies itself. Almost every testifier says that it’s far too cumbersome and inconvenient for researchers to go from state to state and agency to agency, asking for permission to access personally identifiable information for the research.
Proponents (of working past, or of removing, the federal ban on any centralization of personally identifiable information) never mention the fact that the data itself was taken without informed consent. Think of it. In the case of the millions and millions of records held in school systems’ State Longitudinal Database Systems (SLDS) no child nor parent was ever asked whether data about the child’s personal data: his or her academic abilities, nonacademic characteristics, family address, demographic data, behavioral data, medical data, or IEPs, might be shared with researchers without that family’s knowledge or consent.
They talk about “evidence-based policy” but never about informed consent.
They talk about the magic of research, but never about unintended consequences.
And they never talk about the constitutional right to not have citizens’ “personal effects” taken away by the government.
COMMON CORE 