Jeff Drummond was clearly none too impressed with a recent NY Times‘ editorial. He writes:
 […]
Let’s Fisk the Times piece: “The National Institutes of Health, which was responsible for safeguarding the data, made things worse by delaying in notifying the patients.” Really? How were things made worse? Was there an improper use that earlier notification could’ve prevented? As far as I can tell, there has been no improper use at all. In fact, I’m fairly certain (under my “crackhead” theory of data loss) that there has been and will be no data loss; in fact, I can pretty much guarantee that the data was scrubbed off the system entirely and the hard-drive cleaned and re-written so that the stolen laptop could be resold and the thief (and his trading partners) could make some money off of it. In fact, earlier notification might’ve clued the thieves off that the laptop had valuable information on it, and encouraged them to use it rather than scrub it. There’s a perfectly logical argument that the delay in notification would help, rather than hinder, in assuring the information did not fall into the wrong hands (whatever the hell that means — who is going to improperly use this information? C’mon, be realistic.)
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