California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed three privacy bills on Wednesday September 29, 2004, including a bill that would have required employers to notify employees of e-mail monitoring, and two bills that would have restricted the outsourcing of medial and financial data services. Schwarzenegger said the bills were redundant to current law and would have only created more work for California businesses. Detailed story…

I’m afraid I do not agree with Governor Schwarzenegger. Of the three vetoed bills, one bill would have limited data that medical firms can send abroad for processing without a patient’s consent. If the current law is sufficient to protect patient privacy, how could this happen in October 7, 2003? A pakistan woman named Lubna Baloch, sent an email to UC San Francisco Medical Center to threaten she would disclose patient medical records if UCSF Medical Center do not help her get the money she was owed. In her email she said, “Just to make you believe that I am not bluffing I am attaching latest voice file and text of your hospital.” Baloch had included private discharge summaries for two UCSF patients. Detailed story…