Disability Insurance Observer: Investigations

But terrorists have never directly bothered me. The government’s effort to protect me causes me stress every day.

When the Washington Post wrote about “PRISM” — a National Security Agency (NSA) effort to gather information about potential bad guys Facebook, Google, Yahoo and other U.S. providers of Internet-based services — that added to the stress.

In theory, the government has scoured my private e-mail — including, for example, the e-mails in my junk mail folder from con artists in Nigeria who want me to send them my bank account information — to protect me. But the government could use the same information to mistakenly decide that I’m much scarier than I am. Or, if the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hated one of my Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) blogs, maybe someone at HHS could talk to a friend at the NSA to talk to someone in the PRISM office to find some mean thing I wrote about a co-worker in a fit of childish petulance, then use that to show me who’s boss.

If commercial disability insurers move the kinds of investigative practices they’ve used in the off-line world into the digital world, and get legal authorization to do so: That’s great. People who claim disability benefits and then go up on ladders to fix their roofs should expect to attract investigators’ eyes.

Maybe they should expect investigators to get focused, well-justified, court-monitored subpoenas to look in their Facebook message folders.

See also: Social Security Sends Out the Detectives

But if private disability insurance fraud investigators — or government prosecutors who are helping private disability insurers, or even SSDI investigators — use the kinds of high-powered, shadowy, officially sanctioned, un-challengeable tools that the NSA aims at Al Qaeda to catch disability beneficiaries who are healthy enough to fix their roofs, I think that will eventually prove to be catastrophic both for the insurers and for the people who are sincerely looking for terrorists.

If simply filing an insurance claim means that you’re giving the insurer sweeping, open-ended, NSA-like access to look at every naughty word you’ve ever spoken or typed into a telephone or computer, why would any thinking person ever file an insurance claim? If thinking people know they can’t file insurance claims without exposing every word they’ve ever spoken or typed into a voice or data network, why would they buy insurance?

And, if people get a sense that the government often lets investigators use sweeping surveillance tools to monitor ordinary crooks — and ordinary, mostly law-abiding people — why would they let the government use those tools to monitor anyone? People might decide the government is so much more likely to abuse the tools than to use them against high-value targets that the tools have to be taken out of the NSA’s tool belt.