Banks Sue to Overturn Financial Privacy Law; Scuffle with Australian Prime Ministers Security Staff; N.Y. Hospitals Security Systems Draw Scrutiny; Check-In Times to U.S. May Hit Five Hours

Banks Sue to Overturn Financial Privacy Law

The American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and Consumer Bankers Association have asked a federal judge to halt a key provision of Californias new financial privacy law before it takes effect in July, according to an AP story in The San Mateo Daily Journal and elsewhere. The federal The Fair Credit Reporting Act lets banks and other financial institutions share information with their affiliates about customers credit worthiness, credit standing, credit capacity, character, general reputation, personal characteristics, or mode of living, which, the national banking associations say, should pre-empt the provision of Californias law that requires banks to give consumers the opportunity to bar the sale of information with an affiliate that isnt in the same line of business. State Sen. Jackie Speier, the author of the California bill, said another federal law that specifically governs the sharing of financial information clearly says that states can go further in crafting privacy protections. Speiers legislation was signed into law last August by then-Gov. Gray Davis. Consumer groups had threatened to take a stronger measure to voters if the Legislature and Davis didnt pass a financial privacy law.Scuffle with Australian Prime Ministers Security StaffThe Melbourne Age, a security guard was injured in a scuffle with a man who gate-crashed an afternoon tea party attended by Australian Prime Minister John Howard today. Witnesses said a man headbutted one of Howard’s security guards after he was questioned about why he was not wearing a name badge. Howard said he was not concerned when questioned by the media after today’s security scare, and said his security staff always do a good job. Police said a 35-year-old Kilmore man was arrested at the scene and charged with assault.

According to a story in

N.Y. Hospitals Security Systems Draw ScrutinyNew York Times story today, New York City’s 11 public hospitals have no common security system, no uniform method of screening visitors or restricting their access to certain wards of a hospital building. Background checks on new employees can vary widely from one institution to another. There is no central administrator focused solely on security across the entire city system, and decisions about even the most basic practices, like how to screen hospital visitors, are left to each facility. The MTimes says officials at the Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the city system, acknowledge that because their institutions are often in neighborhoods where crime is more prevalent and because they serve a clientele that includes inmates from city jails and patients with severe mental illnesses, they are more likely to have to contend with crime. But medical professionals want to keep hospitals as a place of care and refuge. “The challenge is we have to let you in, and we want to control where you go, and we want to do this without making you feel like you’re in a prison,” said Frank Taormina, the president of the Metropolitan Healthcare Security and Safety Directors Association, a group of security officials from private and municipal hospitals.

According to a

Check-In Times to U.S. May Hit Five HoursGuardian Unlimited, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not announced when it will introduce Advanced Passenger Information System (APIS), which is supposed to identify terror suspects, nor has it decided how much information it will require. Airlines would be asked to transfer information about passengers to the United States prior to departure. The Association of British Travel Agents says the need for passengers to arrive five hours before take-off is based on a study which suggested it would take half a minute to extract the information from each passenger.

Transatlantic travelers to the United States may in future have to check in five hours early for their flights to answer detailed security questions, the travel industry warned yesterday. According to coverage in the U.K.s