How one offshore worker sent tremor through medical system . . .

here's a fascinating article about the implications of offshoring and how one Pakistani worker essentially blackmailed a U.S. hospital . . . part of the Chronicle's ongoing series on the ramifications of shifting U.S. jobs and services overseas . . .

Looking Offshore
Outsourced UCSF notes highlight privacy risk
by David Lazarus
San Francisco Chronicle
March 28, 2004

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/03/28/MNGFS3080R264.DTL

Lubna Baloch sat in her office in the sprawling Pakistani commercial center of Karachi and gazed at the e-mail she'd composed. She tried to imagine the reaction half a world away when the people at UC San Francisco Medical Center saw what she'd written.

The famous U.S. hospital would have to take her seriously, Baloch knew, when it realized she was prepared to post its confidential patient records on the Internet. That is, unless UCSF helped her get the money she was owed from the mysterious Tom Spires, her link in a long chain of medical transcription subcontractors.

"Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed," Baloch wrote in her e-mail, "so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet."

Then the kicker: "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.

She clicked the send button on her computer screen.

- much more . . .

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/03/28/MNGFS3080R264.DTL

If the whole "job loss" reason isn't enought to take more of serious look at offshoring before letting companies dive right in, the exporting of the following surely is :

Medical records
Credit histories
Tax documents
Bank records
Brokerage records
Insurance records
Debt records
Social Security numbers
Credit card numbers

All going to countries that have very lax privacy laws (if at all) and where US laws and prosecution can't touch them.

Trusting corporate giants is hard enough right now....this would surely make many people very very uneasy.

I knew this would happen!

I said this the other day to my husband!!!

Oh this is so funny...all that outsourcing and now your social security number and the fact you have hemorrhoids will be on the internet!!!!