Recently in Feminista! Category

Okay so my entry to finding Ada is a week late : 

This year I entered Dame Caroline Haslett a pioneer for women in the Electrical and professional world in the early 20th Century.  She was the very first secretary to the Women's Engineering Society in 1919 - just six years after Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under Anmer at the 1913 Derby. 

Dame Caroline's IET biography also states

She became Chairman of the Council of Scientific Management in the Home and presented papers on home management in various countries.

While her Electrical legacy appears to be concerned primarily with the domestic use of electricity, she was active in engineering and electrical engineering at a time of great change, gaining her initial training during the First World War and going on to co-found the now disbanded Electrical Association for Women which existed from 1924 until 1987.  

EAW's aim was to promote the use of electricity as a safe domestic tool. The first entirely experimental public electricity supply was made available to subscribers in Godalming, Surrey, UK around 1881, with the first commercial electricity centre being built at Holborn Viaduct the following year.  The 1925 Electricity Supply Act gave rise to the National Grid system in the UK so Dame Caroline Haslett, between the EAW and the Women's Engineering Society, was well placed to encourage and promote the use of electricity in the home.

Dame Caroline was the only female member of the British Electricity Authority from 1947 until 1956.

In this age, some might find Dame Caroline's emphasis on the domestic use of electricity disappointing but she influenced generations of people, educated countless  women on the new technology of their time, was active in the Engineering profession throughout her life - being the sole female member on the Council of the British Institute of Management and the first woman to hold the office of Chairman of the British Electrical Development Association during 1953-1954 as well as acting in an advisory role in women's training for the Ministry of Labour during the Second World War.

Dame Caroline's continued level of activity throughout her entire life certainly deserves a mention when looking for Ada.

The NHS in the UK is rolling out a Summary Care Record - something which contains a summary of any single person's health care - including allergies, any medicines you react to and your current prescriptions.  The concept is that clinicians can obtain important information about you when treating you in an emergency.

On the face of it, it looks like a "good idea" and some businesses have at least turned over a lot of money implementing such a system.

Any one who can suffer anaphylactic shock must have a huge concern over safe treatment if arriving at hospital unconscious since their trigger stimulus can be life threatening.  With their body already in a weakened state, any further threat might prove catastrophic by the time clinicians realise the threat exists.  This example of the motivation behind the system stimulates the desired response. Most people will respond altruistically to such examples and if you have a severe allergy then you want to be as safe as you can be in an emergency as do your relatives and loved ones.

.All sounds well and good except that we must accept some people will and do pervert systems to their own requirements where they can. Otherwise we would not have people who defraud the tax system or the benefit system, hackers defacing websites or indeed people who defraud others via social engineering.

It is never that a security breach will occur but when and how.

Access to data in the NHS is via a Smartcard system. Different staff have different security levels; some have access to depersonalised data and some have access to data identifiable to any individual

There should therefore be no surprise to find, according to this Computer Weekly article,  that one person managed to circumvent existing security procedures and access health records identifiable to specific individuals - a privilege way above their permitted access limit.

According to the article "The [NHS Hull]  trust says: "A total of 358 patients [registered at] GP practices have been affected by this.""

There is already some awareness of the potential risk to patient data in some areas of the NHS system, The Computer Weekly article cites GP Paul Cundy, "a former spokesman on GP IT for the British Medical Association, said of the Hull incident: "This confidentiality breach, in one of Connecting for Health's showcase systems, highlights the inherent dangers of the Summary Care Record and all shared record systems. This is alarming news, but precisely what was predicted.""

NHS Trust management in the form of Kath Tansfield, a Director of the NHS Hull trust with responsibilities for IT in her portfolio takes a different viewpoint; to quote from the article again : "It is shocking to us that an individual who takes on a public service role and who agrees to abide by strict confidentiality agreements should go on to abuse their position and violate patients' rights to privacy"

So we have new systems being implemented with those at the coal face warning of potential dangers in the system and those directing the change being shocked when the predictions and expected human behaviour actually occurs.

I don't think there is anything new in that.

Although I can't help the phrase "The children were shocked!  There were fish in the sea!" wondering across my mind.

Regretfully I can't help but link this information to recent posts in Geek Feminism on harassment and intimidation in the cybersphere, and the blasé attitude of Google to basic information security for somemany people.

The trackback to Melissa's article extends the argument for those systems where we have a choice about entry. Ultimately you can opt-out of a MUD or Google if you have to. 

In the UK we don't have much choice about our entry into the NHS system.  It starts when we are born and persists after our death.
 
Not that I want this article to be used as an argument for private health care as in the USA.  To the contrary.  Your pet stalker has a more limited pool of information from which to access your data and it really doesn't matter that your local Health Centre only hires people it knows and trusts.  Successful stalkers rely on a highly developed skill in social manipulation to get what they want and, like terriers, they simply aren't going to give up that easily. 

It is surely insufficient to propose and develop systems without regard to data security in all its forms including auditing data access at frequent and regular intervals if not on a daily basis.  I wonder how much of this is factored into the costs of a data system like SCR?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/31/female-film-makers

Kristina Clair, volunteer sysadmin for indymedia.us, was served a subpoena by the U.S. government demanding IP information on traffic flow on a specific date. Fortunately for Kristina she was able to call on the EFF for their help.  The subpoena has been described as bogus.

Liz Henry has posted a good interview on the matter at Geek Feminisim.

Interesting viewpoint on volunteer work from Kristina Clair "The common advice for volunteer work is to have good boundaries with it so that it doesn’t burn you out."
.
I'm glad Kristina had the EFF's help on this matter.

Indymedia UK has it's own take on the subject