Bet you any money this was a planned power grab. The judgment, if any, will be a slap on the wrist. Some paltry number of millions that will come out to mere cents per medical record. The cost was probably discussed openly as part of the plan.
“A healthcare provider has sued the Internal Revenue Service and 15 of its agents, charging they wrongfully seized 60 million medical records from 10 million Americans … [The unnamed company alleges] the agency violated the Fourth Amendment in 2011, when agents executed a search warrant for financial data on one employee – and that led to the seizure of information on 10 million, including state judges. The search warrant did not specify that the IRS could take medical information, UPI said. And information technology officials warned the IRS about the potential to violate medical privacy laws before agents executed the warrant, the complaint said.”
Slashdot summary by cold fjord
Medical Firm Sues IRS For 4th Amendment Violation In Records Seizure
Further evidence that every knee will bow:
This is all part of the Gramscian march, which should be dinner conversation by now among literate people. Notice that if private sector jobs and private debt were not being replaced wholesale with government jobs and government spending, we would be in a deeper recession than the Great Depression. There is also a shift in the private sector among the career-building middle class to highly regulated jobs in large companies, or “almost government jobs” as I like to call them. As I’ve explained before, large corporations are almost indistinguishable from political states within a larger nation. (In behavior patterns, they are entirely indistinguishable.)
As a conspiracy theorist, I’d say that the purpose of this is to create a small, strong government that is more easily displaced:
Now I say that those dominions which, when acquired, are added to an ancient state by him who acquires them, are either of the same country and language, or they are not. When they are, it is easier to hold them, especially when they have not been accustomed to self-government; and to hold them securely it is enough to have destroyed the family of the prince who was ruling them; because the two peoples, preserving in other things the old conditions, and not being unlike in customs, will live quietly together, as one has seen in Brittany, Burgundy, Gascony, and Normandy, which have been bound to France for so long a time: and, although there may be some difference in language, nevertheless the customs are alike, and the people will easily be able to get on amongst themselves. He who has annexed them, if he wishes to hold them, has only to bear in mind two considerations: the one, that the family of their former lord is extinguished; the other, that neither their laws nor their taxes are altered, so that in a very short time they will become entirely one body with the old principality.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Chapter II, The Prince
If you’re not a conspiracy theorist yet (and what kind of thinking person is not?), I can’t even begin to describe your reading assignments.
Viktor Isaksen 