One could argue that they aren't necessarily low-lifes: I'd wager many, many people would abuse such power if they could. Which is why it's more important to place constraints on positions of power, than to hope that we only staff those positions with wholly noble people (who are incredibly few in number, in reality).
The other consideration is that if they were doing so under the threat of HIPAA violations, they may not have abused the information quite so casually. Jealous husband fears a slap on the wrist, he abuses the database. Jealous husband fears jail time, he possibly [hires P.I. / follows his wife / etc.].
I'm not defending them–law enforcement enjoys some protections that are arguably unconstitutional, and as such should be held to a much higher standard–but it's unproductive to examine what would have happened if the penalties were different, while simultaneously assuming that the actors would have made identical decisions based on different criteria.
And the reason that's important brings me back to my first point–built-in constraints are the only way to solve this sort of thing, which is the same reasoning the founders used to try to place constraints on American politicians.
Lack of fear of penalties is likely why this happened in the first place. Regardless I should not have used the term low-lifes. I'm fairly sure it's not the appropriate kind of discourse for this place.
Sure, but then we wind up having to broadly categorize most people as low-lifes. Which may be true, but that's all the more reason to construct a system that can survive them, not a system that falls apart when representative human beings are part of it.
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One could argue that they aren't necessarily low-lifes: I'd wager many, many people would abuse such power if they could. Which is why it's more important to place constraints on positions of power, than to hope that we only staff those positions with wholly noble people (who are incredibly few in number, in reality).
The other consideration is that if they were doing so under the threat of HIPAA violations, they may not have abused the information quite so casually. Jealous husband fears a slap on the wrist, he abuses the database. Jealous husband fears jail time, he possibly [hires P.I. / follows his wife / etc.].
I'm not defending them–law enforcement enjoys some protections that are arguably unconstitutional, and as such should be held to a much higher standard–but it's unproductive to examine what would have happened if the penalties were different, while simultaneously assuming that the actors would have made identical decisions based on different criteria.
And the reason that's important brings me back to my first point–built-in constraints are the only way to solve this sort of thing, which is the same reasoning the founders used to try to place constraints on American politicians.
Lack of fear of penalties is likely why this happened in the first place. Regardless I should not have used the term low-lifes. I'm fairly sure it's not the appropriate kind of discourse for this place.
The fact that there may be more of them does not change that they are low-lifes.
Sure, but then we wind up having to broadly categorize most people as low-lifes. Which may be true, but that's all the more reason to construct a system that can survive them, not a system that falls apart when representative human beings are part of it.