Sorry for the late reply. Here is my journal entry for the 3.25 Lecture:

As a non-law student, I find it very interesting to learn about the history which precedes our nation's Constitution and the role of England's laws in forming our laws. In class, I often wonder about how the government would view someone who purposely chooses to share less information and who manages to prevent the government from collecting location data, text messages, etc. I worry that as we move towards automatically allowing the government to listen to every conversation and track every movement, those which appear to be purposefully shielded from tracking may be viewed as more suspicious although it is simply an assertion of constitutional rights.

When I learned about historical trials in England during this lecture, I thought back to this wrong idea that those who attempt to defend themselves through sworn testimony or with the help of a legal defendant must somehow be "guilty" because it requires such an effort to prove their innocence. But in reality, any sort of argument against a more powerful organization (such as the government) will burden the defendant as they attempt to provide proof of their innocence due to an imbalance of power and knowledge.

This imbalance of power and knowledge will come in particularly handy if the government applies its own knowledge of potential jurors towards jury selection and towards the prosecutorial arguments in an effort to sway members of the jury. How would defendants stand a fair chance in this case?

Another class which I am taking this semester spent the week focusing on McCarthyism? and the historical and geopolitical factors which led to accusations and spying on individuals in an effort to "protect the country". As a current public health student, I brought up how our movements are being tracked to determine whether individuals may have been in contact with someone who tests positive for covid-19 and was surprised that many in the class were not aware of this. As a dental student, I know many of the fellow classmates have been receiving texts from New York State requesting them to confirm that they are a medical professional and asking for participation in the effort to address covid. While these messages might seem like a good use of resources in a theoretical world, I wonder how New York State knows which cell phone numbers belong to students in the health professions. Is the aggregation of data from their responses going to be used to build some sort of data set to identify individuals' risk?

As I wrote about in my first paper, I often worry that public health and other health professionals cannot guarantee the safety of the systems they use. Sure, trying to gather patient lifestyle data to improve health seems wonderful, but who else has access to that data? Should medical professionals be building our own apps to ensure encryption, and is encryption even enough to protect patient data if apps are being loaded onto iPhones or other smart devices? I worry that the silo-ing of studies means that people become experts within their field with little understanding of the implications of their work outside of their little bubble.

-- ElenaMcCormick - 09 Apr 2020

I just worked on Project 1. I was able to encrypt a text file on my desktop then email it to myself, download, and decrypt the file. I don't quite understand how to look up other people's public keys: the concept makes sense but when I attempt to look up your name on the server through Kleopatra, I don't get any results. Should I try to email you my public key / an encrypted text file?

Also, how is this different (in terms of efficacy of security) from encrypted emails through systems such as Outlook? I wonder because up at Columbia's medical center we are taught to encrypt any communication with a patient, but I think we are also told not to send any patient data over email (I haven't reached my third year of dental school yet, so I don't communicate directly with patients yet).

When you communicate with your medical professionals, do you trust that their systems are adequately encrypted and secured?

-- ElenaMcCormick - 09 Apr 2020

I don't know how successful that can be. I can only learn about that from you. I hope you will write here about how it goes.

ElenaMcCormick's Journal

Hello. I'm testing out my first journal entry here. After a few weeks of craziness in the world and cancelled classes and this big transition to distance learning, I'm looking forward to continue learning and reading about things that don't relate solely to Covid-19, as a little break from the real world!

-- ElenaMcCormick - 25 Mar 2020

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