Regulating Stupidity And Human Error

Can the government pass a law to stop stupidity and human error? Hillary Clinton thinks so, and my guess is no one will oppose her proposition.

The Senator is proposing a new privacy bill to protect person data theft, like the type that happened to over 20 million veterans and 2 million active duty military. But the truth is, there are already dozens of laws that criminalize what the worker who took the data home did.

There are also tons of them to prevent the type of data theft that occurred with a credit card clearing house, yet they didn't prevent it.

The reason is, as good intentioned as some laws are, they can't regulate human error, such as the programming glitch found in the credit card system a year or so ago, or the DoVA employee trying to get some work done at home.

I've worked in a number of places where taking certain information out of the workplace was not only against company policy, but the current laws. Yet I know that it occurred when folks got rushed for time on projects, or just fell behind for some reason or another. Another law probably won't prevent it from happening again. It may change the penalties that the current laws have, but it won't really make a difference.

Much of what she is proposing is redundant, sound bite legislation, which is great for folks running for reelection, but really don't provide any good.

For instance, she's like companies to be required to let consumers know what data they keep and how they use it and share it. Except there is already a federal law that concerns that, in fact a couple dozen of them, covering everything from medical information to credit information. Just read the fine print in your last installment contract, or credit card application.

Another issue, which she touched on, would be federal surveillance, and requiring a judges approval. FISA is already the law for domestic wiretaps, and there are tons of other ones for criminal investigations. While the constitutionality of the President's terrorist surveillance program is being questioned, it's working its way through the courts. Another law won't make what he's doing any less Constitutional if that's the way the current cases work out.

Her actual comments on that program were what got me laughing, though, as I read the article.

"Unchecked mass surveillance without judicial review may sometimes be legal but it is dangerous. Every president should save those powers for limited critical situations."

Let's see, finding intelligence that terrorists are possibly planning attacks in the US, and communicating with people in the US doesn't amount to a critical situation? Then what does? My guess is if the Brooklyn Bridge plot had worked because we didn't use such techniques she'd be in committee meetings screaming about the fact that the Bush administration was asleep at the wheel, and ignored the warnings.

For more Hillary Funnies go check out Lone Pony's post about her getting booed by liberal activists.