Colorado Spending Transparency

They’ve gone to Boulder to weigh in on the rights of free expression for a woman who wants to garden topless in her front yard right near an elementary school. According to Westword, the Boulder Chapter of the ACLU doesn’t think the city should ban exposed female nipples in the front yard.

Judd Golden, chair of the Boulder chapter said:

The ACLU hasn’t taken a position on this, but our overall view is that we really think government ought to stay out of people’s private lives. These are the types of things that some people put into the category of free expression, and the government has other concerns…

“Other concerns” like intruding into the most personal aspects of your life.  HB 1330, the transparency Trojan horse, will require every single health care transaction in Colorado to be reported to a massive government database.

Don’t think this is just for public health care programs like Medicaid or that paying cash can keep you and your family out.  Why?  Prime sponsor State Rep John Kefalas explained in a press release after the measure passed out of the House health and human services committee, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”  In other words, Kefalas and company want to “manage” your health care.  And they guarantee privacy.

In this era of Big Data, there is no way guarantee your or your family’s privacy.  Associate Professor of Law specializing in information privacy at CU Paul Ohm wrote in his paper titled “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization” :

This research unearths a tension that shakes a foundational belief about data privacy: Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both. (original emphasis)

And the ACLU should be all over this.  But it’s not. Instead  ACLU of Colorado is choosing to direct its energy and legislative resources toward gender equity in health care rates, reproductive services and voting rights for the incarcerated.

It seems that politics has replaced concern over privacy issues. The organization that courageously stood nearly alone in its challenge of the federal government when it interned Japanese Americans in 1943 is now on the sidelines of one of the 21st century’s biggest intrusion into individual rights.