Going to the Pharmacy in Australia

My uncle was just told that his Chemist won’t be accepting physical prescriptions any more. What we have here in Australia is this marvellous newfangled way of doing prescriptions: e-scripts. The Doctor sends you an SMS message with a QR code and you show that to the chemist; saves on a Doctor’s visit when you need a new prescription and gets rid of the rigmarole of losing the bit of paper etc.

It happened to me a few months ago: my Doctor was away and I couldn’t get to the surgery so they sent me a QR code instead of a paper prescription.

I was actually quite annoyed at having to come into the 21st century on this one.

Now all this would be fine: except that when you use a paper prescription, the only person who knows about it is you, the chemist, and the database the chemist uses. Of course that database could be hacked. We have the illusion that things on computers, internet, mobile phones are private: they are not — all these forums are highly vulnerable to hacking.

We are very accustomed to thinking that SMS is secure and private, that only if someone has your phone could they see your SMSs — but SMS is data, and once it’s out there it has to pass through numerous cell towers, SMS exchanges, etc etc. Well it turns out that thinking SMS is a private message from one person to another is a complete joke; we now know that China has hacked the SMS and call logs of high profile individuals in the US, and that CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) and the FBI are now advising that officials, politicians, anyone who might be targeted, should start using private encrypted messaging services for all calls and messages.

So, really, putting your medical records on SMS, as far as China is concerned, is about as safe and secure as emailing them directly to the Chinese Ministry of State Security. For the sake of convenience in medical matters, our government has put at risk every politician, every security agency head, and really, every citizen of Australia. I’d be interested in knowing if this Pharmacy QR Code bulls**t is happening in the US as well - I doubt it somehow — the State control of medical matters is far more advanced in Australia than many other countries. We are becoming a model of the modern technocracy, in many ways, with the government trying to centralise all data gathering. Revelation 13:16-18 here we come!

If I was Chinese intelligence right now and had the obvious capability to monitor and suck in Western call logs and text messages and possibly even text transcripts of all calls (I would be very surprised if the Five Eyes governments were not doing transcripts of all calls right now) well the thing I’d be doing (if I was Chinese intelligence as I said) is sucking in as much data as possible.

It would be far easier I would imagine to replace someone’s diabetes drug or heart medication en route with some poison or other than to assassinate them in another way.

In any case, I don’t think the Australian government has thought through the implications of sending everyone’s medical data along an insecure data channel. I wish there was an alternative political party that actually had some common sense in these areas.

The least the chemist should be doing is sending the prescriptions via Telegram or some such other secure app.

Photo by Marielle Ursua on Unsplash Great photo, but of course, this image is just a QR code stock photo, but it’s kindof the other way round at an Australian chemist: the chemist uses a scanner to scan the QR code from your phone onto their computer.