Remember this?
VANCOUVER, British Columbia; February 28, 2003 -- BC Hydro and Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today signed a ten year, $1.45 billion agreement designed to save BC Hydro customers $250 million and expand Accenture's ability to offer customer relationship management, IT, human resources, financial, procurement services, building and office management services to utilities across North America.
Well, it turns out that Accenture is also in the vote fixing and the homeland security business:
"...Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these voters were turned away from the polls. After the election, determined by 537 votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning African-Americans, these errors may have put
"This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released."
But never fear, Minister of Health Colin Hansen just last week assured us that the American multinational that will soon to be awarded British Columbia's electronic health records privatization contract would never give out our information to anybody.All of which would be fine, except for this from the memory hole:
".....But the real potential problems with the move (to electronic recording) came in the past few weeks when the BCGEU realized that the two final bidders for the MSP contract were both American-based and that that could bring British Columbians’ files under the rubric of the U.S. federal Patriot Act.
"The two potential contractors are Maximus and IBM. Maximus is based in Virginia. IBM is a US-based multinational with a Canadian subsidiary which would be responsible for the running of any MSP contract. But legal opinions remain unclear as to whether even the existence of a Canadian subsidiary would be enough to protect the files of B.C. residents from the long arm of the Patriot Act."
So there you have it....John Ashcroft already knows how much electricity you use and he soon might know about your pre-existing health conditions when you attempt to cross the border.
Hmmmm....what happens when Telus gets gobbled up by, oh say, Verizon?....will Johnny A be able to get his grubby hands on your phone and online records info as well?
Hell, what was I thinking....he's probably got them already.
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Update 7:45am July 27th
Raymond Tomlin over at Van Ramblings has this story nailed from every angle, including the fact that IBM will soon have access to the information on every desktop computer used by B.C. government employees.
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