How 100 hospitals switched to pen and paper to defeat a national cyber-attack

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Medical staff had to switch to pen and paper, improvising workarounds to protect patients while IT teams scrambled and the national cyber response centre tried to find out how the hackers had got in - and how they could stop them.

 

 

How 100 hospitals switched to pen and paper to defeat a national cyber-attack
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Technology is beautiful, isn't it? Ha ha.

 

Smartphone Location Data Deserves Full Fourth Amendment Protection, US Supreme Court Rules

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In a ruling handed down on June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court declared that scooping up someone's cellphone location data officially counts as a search that requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment.

 

Smartphone Location Data Deserves Full Fourth Amendment Protection, US Supreme Court Rules
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While the fine details weren't disclosed, it seems like the approach that was used in the case in question was pretty reasonable. They asked for anonymized information about phones that were within a pretty small area within a pretty small time window. I don't know if either of those could have reasonably been made smaller as I don't know the granularity of the location data that is retained. They then worked with that anonymized data to narrow things down further (that's what would be far more interesting to see) and eventually asked for the identifying information for only three individuals. That strikes me as a pretty focused approach that respected privacy rights on par with normal investigative techniques -- investigators routinely start with much larger pools of potential suspects, by name, and do considerably more intrusive digging in order to winnow the list down.

I'm far more concerned about broader data surveillance and pattern analysis.

Shifting gears, it reinforces the notion that many/most people that commit crimes are far from criminal masterminds. You are going to rob a bank, yet you are going to carry your cellphone with you while you do it? Then again, how many folks have gotten caught because they posted selfies of themselves on public social media accounts showing off the items they stole?

 

Smartphone Location Data Deserves Full Fourth Amendment Protection, US Supreme Court Rules
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What if they are given permission. Some driving apps work that way. "Let's force them to give us permission".