Chase is ruining Amazon’s good name

A couple years ago, I switched my Wells Fargo MasterCard to an Amazon Rewards Visa card. Unfortunately, Amazon’s Visa card is managed by Chase, who has no idea how to run a business, build a web site or provide customer service. The complaints piled up in my mind, but it wasn’t until I returned from …

Privacy by Design

The latest CDT Policy Post discusses the importance Privacy by Design. They extensively reference Anne Cavoukian (Ontario’s kickass Privacy Commissioner and author of Who Knows). The seven principles of Privacy by Design are: Proactive, not Reactive; Preventative, not Remedial Privacy as the Default Privacy Embedded into Design Full Functionality – Positive-Sum, not Zero-Sum End-to-End Lifecycle …

Good help is hard to find (or: Nancy Pelosi annexes Canada)

I wrote Nancy Pelosi, letting her know that electronic voting machines are problematic and voter-verified paper ballots are essential. She wrote me back: Like her colleague Diane Feinstein, she is having trouble finding competent correspondence staff. Note the key paragraph here: Senator Bill Nelson (D-NB) introduced the companion Senate bill, S. 1431, on July 9th, …

Diane Feinstein sending constituents bad info

As part of a letter-writing campaign, I recently asked Senator Diane Feinstein to support health care (health insurance?) reform. The form letter I got back is simply wrong. She wrote “However, neither the Senate nor the House has adopted a single, comprehensive bill for consideration.” The House passed “a single comprehensive bill” (HR 3962, the …

Sixty-five more reasons to call congress

Reposted from my daily kos diary: A while ago, I wrote about Stories of Health, our project to document how America’s broken health care system affects us all. On the eve of Congress’ historic health care vote, I have some more stories to share. Since that time, we’ve continued to travel. We spent a week …