Supposedly, the primary directive of health care providers is "Do no harm," yet in every doctor's office I walk into today, the first thing they want to know is my name and social security number so that they can enter it into their electronic database. If I don't give it to them or deny them permission to store it electronically, they crash. They will often stare at me in befuddlement or start babbling nonsensically, unable to process what I just said or continue with the task of diagnosing or providing health care. This has happened even when they already had a two-inch thick folder of paper medical records and had been treating me for 30 years.

Several years ago, the thriving marketplace for millions of medical records stolen from insecure health care provider databases was called Hansa Marketplace. Hansa was shut down in 2017, but it matters not. Today, it's Samsara. If you want to buy millions of your own state's voter records, the entire LinkedIn name/email/password database, millions of names and SSNs stolen from hospital databases, or lists of US children's names and SSNs lifted from pediatrician's databases that won't be used for tax reporting for years so that you can use them to report wages for undocumented workers in your meat packing plant, Samsara is the place to go. It's easy too - download Tor from www.torproject.org, bring up any Tor search engine, and search for "samsara". There you'll find drugs, counterfeit money, credit card numbers, bank accounts, dozens of corporation's customer accounts and passwords, voter records, drivers license databases, fake ids, fake passports, and kid's names and SSNs because parents are so naive as to just answer the question whenever anyone in a white jacket asks them for their children's names and SSNs - Social engineering at its finest.

The next time you are sitting in an exam room unsupervised waiting for a nurse to walk in and take your blood pressure, try not to look too hard at the computer bolted to the wall. It is physically connected to their network, you could attach anything you wanted to without anyone knowing, and someone is about to type a password into it. If you look at that gigantic gaping hole in their security that is observed firsthand by millions of patients every day, your blood pressure will go up, and your doctor certainly wouldn't want that.