Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
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Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#2This is horrible but not surprising, the government was told beforehand it was a bad idea and within a few months ended up with egg on their faces. Instead of remedying the situation they shoot the messenger.
Dr Teague was also part of the team that found flaws in the Swiss e-voting system used in Australia state elections, nothing was done about and she was written off, the attack was deemed impractical as it required a corrupt official.
She's a national treasure and a regular source of embarrassment for the technologically illiterate bureaucrats responsible for such poor decisions.
Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#3> The breach so shocked the government, the then attorney general, George Brandis, quickly announced plans to criminalise the act of re-identifying previously de-identified data, although ultimately the legislation never passed before the 2019 election.
If Australia makes it illegal to re-identify information, what about information that has been re-identified outside Australia then distributed into Australia?
Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#4Vanessa Teague:
> I can't believe @healthgovau is still saying "The dataset does not contain the personal information of patients." We have shown many of the patients' records can be easily and confidently identified from a few points of medical or childbirth info.
Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#5This is horrible but not surprising, the government was told beforehand it was a bad idea and within a few months ended up with egg on their faces. Instead of remedying the situation they shoot the messenger. Dr Teague was also part of the team that found flaws in the Swiss e-voting system used in Australia state elections, nothing was done about and she was written off, the attack was deemed impractical as it requir…
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Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#6To anyone coming to the comments, the title is misleading. The health department is pressuring her "to stop her speaking out about the Medicare and PBS history of over 2.5 million Australians being re-identifiable online due to a government bungle."
Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#7> The breach so shocked the government, the then attorney general, George Brandis, quickly announced plans to criminalise the act of re-identifying previously de-identified data, although ultimately the legislation never passed before the 2019 election. If Australia makes it illegal to re-identify information, what about information that has been re-identified outside Australia then distributed into Australia?
If you're going to start using logic and reason with this issue then that government will simply outlaw those as well. This government has already set a precedent of having overridden the basic limits of mathematics before. See also: anything to do with encryption.
Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#8Vanessa Teague: > I can't believe @healthgovau is still saying "The dataset does not contain the personal information of patients." We have shown many of the patients' records can be easily and confidently identified from a few points of medical or childbirth info. https://twitter.com/VTeagueAus/status/1236402085974798336
> "The dataset does not contain the personal information of patients."
As far as I can tell, 'personal information' is potentially the only thing this data set contains. Further, the information is so personal that the Australian government hoped that it would be infeasible to cross-reference it with other data and use it to identify the persons involved.
Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#9> The breach so shocked the government, the then attorney general, George Brandis, quickly announced plans to criminalise the act of re-identifying previously de-identified data, although ultimately the legislation never passed before the 2019 election. If Australia makes it illegal to re-identify information, what about information that has been re-identified outside Australia then distributed into Australia?
If you're going to start using logic and reason with this issue then that government will simply outlaw those as well. This government has already set a precedent of having overridden the basic limits of mathematics before. See also: anything to do with encryption.
Relevant article, for the curious: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/malcolm-turnbull-prime-mi...
Re: Melbourne professor quits after government pressure about reporting data breach
#10The title is just horrible.