Criminal Activity at Kaiser HMO

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Shortly before I was scheduled to look for billing discrepancies at Kaiser HMO, a gunman fired a sawed-off shotgun in my general direction. Prior to the shooting, a Kaiser data-processing employee claimed that I was a "gunslinger" hired by Kaiser management to get rid of employees and that I should be "taken out and shot." She claimed that she could paralyze Kaiser programmers by making us see the colors red over green.

I was obstructed in conveying my reports to my clients at Kaiser and subjected to intimidation by Kaiser employees. A Kaiser data-processing employee monitored my movements as I prepared to visit the internal audit department at Kaiser to discuss my concerns. I received numerous hang up calls in rapid succession in the hour or so that passed between my two visits with the internal audit department.

A whole array of incidents including arson fires, explosions and property damage began at that time and has continued to the present. I believe that two fires resulted in one fatality each.

This website is owned by:

Jim Ristrem

jimristrem@earthlink.net

Updated December 5th 2008: I plan on removing this site shortly before January 1st 2009. If there is anything here you would like to save before then, please do so.

Updated December 4th 2008: A physician's body was recently found at the bottom of an elevator shaft in downtown San Francisco. The physician had been an activist for pro-Israeli causes. I had worked at a business yards from the building where the dead physician was found. Persons whom I worked with at Kaiser had worked for Crocker Bank's data processing operation which at an earlier time had been located in the building where the body was found or next door. The name of one of these Kaiser employees and his wife and an unusually large gasoline can had been left at different times near the prospective site of Home Depot in San Francisco in incidents which I describe elsewhere on this page. This may be a coincidence.

News articles about the physician death can located by searching for "Daniel Kliman" at http://news.google.com

Updated November 19th 2008: The Tea Fire noted in my November 15th post appears to have been caused by an unattended bonfire. The Santa Barbara Independent reported on Nov. 18th: "The cause of the fire appears to be the result of carelessness rather than criminal intent. Sometime Wednesday evening, November 12, the ten apparently headed up to the Tea Garden to party and this including starting what the Sheriff called a bonfire. When they left sometime between 3 and 5 a.m. Thursday morning, those who attended the gathering told investigators that they thought they had put out the fire, which was built near a wall in the Tea Garden area. Rather than dying out, coals from the fire continued to smolder throughout the day and ignited when the strong sundowner winds picked up Thursday evening." The news article can be viewed at:

http://www.independent.com/news/2008/nov/18/tea-fire-cause-determined/

Updated November 15th 2008: These items may only be coincidences. I found the three match-like objects pictured near the top of this page during a walk which took me near the Japanese Tea House in Golden Gate Park on November 2nd. One of the photographs of Jameson Irish Whiskey bottles posted here a long while ago was taken at a specialty store where I used to shop which specializes in coffee and tea. The November 15th San Francisco Chronicle contains this news: "The conflagration in Santa Barbara County - dubbed the Tea Fire - broke out Thursday at 5:45 p.m. in the Tea House, a historic and defunct tea cafe in the hills of Montecito." See:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/15/MN8V144NUS.DTL

Updated November 8th 2008: In noting a recent fire on Angel Island, I am not making the claim that my interest is a cause or a sufficient condition for a fire. But I am suggesting that more than coincidence may be involved.

Prior to a fire of a few hundred acres on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, I began listening to a series of pre-recorded presentations which mentioned Angel Island. I have added an excerpt from the series in the section of audio files near the bottom of this page. The excerpt is listed as "Prior to Angel Island Fire."

Updated November 1st 2008: A month or two ago, I began listening to a series of recorded lectures dealing with topics including immigration. The speaker's surname was "Burns" and she mentioned the role Angel Island in San Francisco Bay played as an immigrant processing station. After I began listeneing to the series of lectures, a fire of several hundred acres broke out on Angel Island. I am including this only for completeness, as it may only be coincidence.

Updated October 17th 2008: I have previously listed serious incidents involving children at locations I routinely visit: (1) A child was shot a short distance from a public library where a book had earlier been tagged with my name and the date of the shooting. (2) A baby was, according to the father, kidnapped from a car parked at an interestection. A few hours before the alleged kidnapping occurred, I had taken photographs at the same intersection. Among the photos I had taken was one of the store where the father was shopping when his baby was allegedly kidnapped. Later, the baby was found dead in a park. Here is another incident which I am including only for completeness. I do not know if it is related or completely unrelated to other incidents: The son of a friend of mine was murdered. This friend and I had been enrolled in one or two college courses together. I still encounter this friend on my walks. Her son was killed a few years ago and I have waited until now to note it here.

Updated September 21st 2008: "At UCLA, animal rights protests have included attempted firebombings and one instance in which a researcher's home was flooded with a garden hose. Looking at the numbers, it's pretty clear that keeping things quiet in the press hasn't toned down the protesters much. It's just as clear, however, that the protesters aren't reaching their goals, either."

This news article, published June 11th 2008, is at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/11/BAJ1116QVQ.DTL&tsp=1

Updated July 31st 2008: Excerpt from the article, "Stalked: A Decade on the Run" published by in the New York Times, July 31st 2008:

"Mark Wynn, a retired police lieutenant and a consultant on stalking who advises the United States Justice Department, said that micro-tampering in a victim’s life is not unusual. 'I’ve actually worked cases as a police investigator where the offender would do similarly bizarre things,' he said. 'It’s the constant behavior that the offender wants the victim to know, ‘I’m here, and I can get to you.’ ”

This article from the New York Times is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/fashion/31stalk.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Updated July 12th 2008: I came across "MADDI" scrawled in large letters on one of my routine walking routes on July 2nd 2008. "Maddi" is the surname of a former UC Berkeley student and drug dealer who lived near me. I have added a photo of this incident near the bottom of this page.

Updated July 11th 2008: On June 8th 2008, I took several pictures in front of a San Francisco high school named after a politician: School of the Arts - J. Eugene McAteer Campus. Two days later, a 15 year old was shot dead in front of another San Francisco high school named after a politician and his wife: Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School. This is likely to be a coincidence and I am including it here only for completeness.

Here is a link to a news article about the shooting of a 15 year old boy in front of Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School in San Francisco high school: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/10/BA351172IH.DTL

(One of the photos I took in front of the McAteer campus was of a coyote which had narrowly missed being hit by cars in front of the high school as I walked on the sidewalk. It is posted near the bottom of this page.)

Updated July 3rd 2008: During a labor strike, I worked with a Kaiser administrator named by the San Francisco Chronicle in the article "Bad Doctors Going Unpunished - State Medical Board says SF Kaiser Tried to Hide Physician's Mistakes." I am including this fact for completeness only. Here is a link to the San Francisco Chronicle article: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/08/09/MN49453.DTL

Updated June 19th 2008: Added a photo of the San Francisco streetcar stop where a boy was shot on April 26th 2008. A book inside the nearby Ingleside branch library had been tagged with my name and the date of the shooting and left in public view prior to the shooting. The book had been tagged as part of the normal process library staff follows when holding a book for a patron. Pictures of the book tag and shooting scene are posted below.

Updated June 18th 2008: On June 17th 2008, I came across the graffiti "BIN LoDEN" along one of my customary walking routes. This variation of "bin Laden" rhymes with the name of a programmer I worked with at Kaiser. Scrawled alongside it was "BQM." I have added a photograph of this near the top of this page.

Posted May 27th 2008: Today, brand new unauthorized purchases totalling $300 were attempted using an account of mine. I do not know if the thief actually succeeded in receiving the merchandise or services. The merchant in today's transactions is not the one used in the five attempts on May 25th 2008.

Posted May 25th 2008: In the past 24 hours, five attempts have been made to make unauthorized purchases using my account.

Updated May 27th 2008: I took a few photographs on May 21st, walked a few doors from the spot where I stood to take photos to a Subway Sandwich shop, and then returned a book at the main San Francisco Public Library in the next block. After leaving the library, I noticed four emergency vechicles from the San Francisco Fire Department leaving from the exact location where I had taken photos 25 minutes earlier. A workman who had been casually watching the incident told me he thought the SFFD had responded to a false alarm, but he could not be sure. I am including this incident only for completeness. See photo below labelled "SFFD as I walked away from library May 21st 2008."

Posted May 1st 2008: A child was shot at Faxon and Ocean Avenues in San Francisco on April 26th. At a library at the intersection where the shooting occurred, a book had been tagged with my name and date of April 26th 2008. The tag was generated by the library staff as they put the book on hold for me. The book and tag were plainly visible on the open shelves near the front of the library a week or two before the shooting. A scanned image of the tag is displayed elsewhere on this page. Here is a link to an article about the shooting in the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/26/BA3Q10CMR1.DTL

Posted April 12th 2008: A policeman entered a bus I was riding on this evening in response to a report that somebody was being threatened in the back of the bus, he said. (San Francisco MUNI bus #8426 at approximately 5:45 p.m.) Nobody had been threatened, however. It appears that the policeman was responding to a false alarm.

Posted April 6th 2008: Somebody pulled a fire alarm switch on April 4th inside the supermarket where I routinely shop. Firemen were busy dealing with the alarm when I arrived to buy groceries. There was no fire and it was a false alarm. The supermarket is a short distance down the street from where a sign with the names of one of my Kaiser supervisors and his wife was left and (at a different time) a gas can was left.

Updated March 30th 2008: An item I previously received in the mail has "KIDS" in block letters on the front and two World Trade Center references on the back. The envelope was mailed to my home to an addressee I do not know. I have no idea what significance, if any, this has. I am noting it here only for completeness.

Posted March 22nd 2008: On Friday March 21st 2008 at 10:09 p.m. there was a loud explosion in my neighborhood, probably near Sigmund Stern Grove. One person who heard it described it as being as loud as a bomb.

Updated March 23rd 2008: Earlier, I added audio clips of a 7 or 8 minute tirade by a man who announced that he worked at all the Children's Hospitals, yelling very loudly at passengers, including me, to get off a San Francisco MUNI subway car as we travelled from Van Ness station, Church Street station, Castro Station, Forest Hill station to West Portal station where he disembarked. If you listen very carefully, in one of the audio clips you can hear him say that he worked at all the Children's Hospitals. The audio clips are near the bottom of this page.

Posted March 2nd 2008: Added an audio recording of a San Francisco MUNI bus passenger saying that a man was threatening her. It is labelled "Feb 2008 MUNI passenger threatened" in the MP3 recordings near the bottom of this page.

Posted March 1st 2008: Added an account of two recent incidents which occurred on public transit in San Francisco. While I was riding a San Francisco bus a week or so ago, a woman seated near me said in a loud voice that a male passenger was threatening her. The man was standing behind me while I was seated. The female passenger declined the driver's offer to call the police and exited the bus. Today while I was riding the subway in San Francisco, a male passenger entered, said that he was an employee of Children's Hospital, and repeatedly ordered passengers in a loud voice to get off the subway car if they weren't born in San Francisco. He clearly did not like asians.

Posted February 13th 2008: Earlier I posted a phone message from a mortgage company responding to "my" request. The first peculiarity is that I had not contacted them or any other mortgage firm. The second peculiarity is that the mortgage company shares the same name as a pre-school in my neighborhood. The phone message is labelled "Mortgage Application I Didn't Make" and is posted near the bottom of this page in the "Audio Clips" section.

Updated February 10th 2008: Added photo near bottom of this page of mechanical booms near "UCSF IS TORTURING DOGS WITH OUR MONEY" graffiti.

Posted February 2nd 2008 (Revised February 10th): I added a photograph of "UCSF IS TORTURING DOGS WITH OUR MONEY" graffiti taken October 20th 2006 along one of my routine walking routes. Within a few yards of the graffiti were two mechanical booms and a Penske rental truck. The graffiti was within view of a San Francisco hospital and close to the spot where I photographed a Jameson Irish Whiskey bottle.

Posted January 12th 2008: Posted two photos taken at a spot on one of my walking routes where I often pause for a few minutes to take pictures or admire the vista. Both photos were taken in 2007. The first photo was taken before a house fire. The second photo shows damage from the fire. I am including these photos for completeness only. They are near the bottom of this page.

Posted December 29th 2007: Added another photo of the destruction caused by a fire at the former location of the Red Fern Irish social club. The photo shows a Hertz mechanical boom parked across the street from the fire scene and was taken on December 27th.

Posted December 29th 2007: Added a photo taken at a pre-school in my neighborhood of graffiti which looks vaguely like the outline of an automatic weapon. A picture of a bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey beneath this drawing was posted here on December 27th. Photo taken December 27th 2007.

Posted December 28th 2007: Added photo of destruction caused by a fire at the former Red Fern Irish fraternal orgnaization in San Francisco. The fire occurred approximately a week ago. I had worked for an entity which has offices located a few doors away. I am including this item only for completeness.

Posted December 27th 2007: Added photo of a Jameson Irish Whiskey bottle on a ledge at a pre-school pointed at childrens' area. Also, see related photo of a Jameson Irish Whiskey bottle labelled, "Whiskey bottle pointed at firelog box. Site is identical to one where gas cans were left repeatedly."

Posted December 8th 2007: Two photos of damage done in a residential fire on April 9th 2007 in my neighborhood are posted near the top of this page. The fire resulted in one fatality. AFTER THE FIRE somebody placed an object nearby which an ARSON INVESTIGATOR HAD IDENTIFIED AS A MEANS FOR STARTING ARSON FIRES. He said the object was preferred by arsonists because it is consumed by fire and leaves no trace. Somebody placed this object near the fire scene AFTER the fire, not before the fire. At various places where I lived during the time I worked at Kaiser and afterwards, identical objects were left inches from my front door as well as in front of buildings where I lived. One building burned in a fire which destroyed dozens of apartments after co-workers at Kaiser recommended it as a place to live. Identical objects were left along my normal walking routes as well as within blocks of a Kaiser hospital.

Posted November 25th 2007: Shots were recently fired at a person or persons at an intersection where I regularly patronized a restaurant over a span of years. The intersection is several blocks away from the location where the name of a sniper ("Malvo") was painted along with the name of a Kaiser programmer with whom I worked (photo near the bottom of this page.) The intersection is also several blocks away from another location where the graffiti "CLNER" was painted. In my neighborhood, the graffiti "CLNER" along with the name of another Kaiser programmer with whom I worked was painted on a building across the street from a playground where an arson fire caused $100,000 damage. A part of the "CLNER" graffiti on the building across the street from the playground can be seen in a photo on page 2 of this website. I have no opinion about the connection, if any, among these events. I am including this information only for completeness.

Posted November 12th 2007: On 9/22/2007 or 9/23/2007 a plastic slide in the childrens' play area of the San Francisco municipal park in the 1500 block of Vicente Street was torched. According to a newspaper account, the plastic slide melted to the ground. In my neighborhood, this is at least the 3rd arson fire in childrens' play areas along Vicente Street and nearby Sigmund Stern Grove. In August 2007 I took photographs of a Hertz mechanical boom parked yards from the park where the arson occurred in September 2007. EPA records show that assets of original owner and occupant of the Kaiser HMO computer center became a part of Hertz-Penske Corporation which preceeded the present Hertz Corporation. (Photo posted below.)

Posted October 16th 2007: I recently posted a photo of fire damage to an apartment building near the bottom of this page. Several months prior to the fire, I had met with someone across the street from the building for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. I do not have reliable information about the cause of the fire, but a person who is in the neighborhood on a daily basis told me that it was caused by a candle or a cigarette. The apartment building is on one of my regular walking routes. On the same route on the same day that I first saw the fire damage, I noticed that a physician's office had been tagged with a cross and name of a street on which a fatal fire described elsewhere on this page occurred. I am including this information only for completeness.

Posted September 19th 2007: Approximately six explosions occurred at 3:35 am or 3:36 am today, 9/19/2007, close to a child care center in my neighborhood. I heard all the explosions but saw only the last one which was accompanied by a momentary bright white light and sparks.

Posted September 6th 2007: A letter arrived in the mail today. In it a physician writes, "With great sadness I must tell you that I am quite ill and cannot continue to practice." I am acquainted with neither the physician nor the person he was writing to, although it was sent to my address. Updated October 11th 2007: Included in the envelope was a letter from a second physician. The second physician's last name matched the name of a translator whose book I had checked out of the San Francisco Public Library approximately two weeks earlier. Previously, in an incident described elsewhere on this page, I had received a call from a stranger regarding the robbery of a physician whose last name matched the title of a book I had recently checked out of the San Francisco Public Library. I am including this for completeness only. UPDATED JULY 7TH 2008: I have posted the letter in which a physician writes that he is too ill to practice. It is near the bottom of this page. In the past, I was offered a job either in the building where the physician had his office or nearby.

Posted August 17th 2007: I routinely walk by two restaurants whose front windows were broken during the past few (two? three?) months. These might be random incidents. However, for completeness I have added a photo taken at one of the restaurants on August 14th 2007. The photo is near the bottom of this page.

Updated June 16th 2008: When I first met with arson investigators at the San Francisco Fire Department in 1991, one of them told me that somebody had set off what sounded like two pipe bombs as he left his home to go to work that day. He said he believed that they were actually pipe bombs and were deliberately set for him. He also said that he was not going to investigate those explosions because (I believe these were his exact words) "there is simply too much of this stuff going on" and "every high school kid knows how to make a pipe bomb." He and his partner declined to investigate my concerns, attributing the events I described to random acts by teenagers. Incredibly, he told me that explosions I heard came from a distant firing range even though the explosions happened late at night hours after the firing range had closed and were much louder than any shots fired at the shooting range.

These arson investigators were painting their offices when I arrived and when I left. Having fresh paint on their walls was a higher priority for them than investigating my concerns.

Updated June 26th 2007: Recently I received two medical bills for a patient whom I have never met. However, some of the past intimidating messages that had been sent to me included this patient's last name. The patient lives on 39th Avenue in San Francisco. This may or may not be a coincidence. I am noting this incident for completeness.

Updated June 21st 2007: Yesterday I found a panel from a box of Black Cat brand bullets a short distance from the site where I had earlier found a stylized zodiac symbol. The box panel was stuck in the ground where I routinely walk.

Updated June 7th 2007: "Teen boy held on suspicion of planting bombs outside S.F. General . . . A 16-year-old boy from Belmont was arrested Wednesday night after he allegedly placed two bombs outside San Francisco General Hospital. The boy was found to be in possession of a third explosive when he was arrested, San Francisco police said. They did not immediately describe the bombs." See the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle at:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/07/BAGFSQAVCA4.DTL

Also, there was another incident near my residence last night at 9:59 p.m. but it was barely audible from my home. The night before last, somebody near the front of my house yelled what sounded like my name at 3 a.m. I live in a very quiet neighborhood where people don't yell on the streets.

Updated May 16th 2007: I added a photo where the name of a Kaiser employee I worked with was scrawled alongside graffiti consisting of the outline of a bullet and the name ("Malvo") of a sniper. The photo was added to the pictures near the bottom of this page.

Updated May 10th 2007: Once again, there was another incident in my neighborhood last night, but not loud like other incidents.

Updated May 9th 2007: Once again, there was another incident in my neighborhood last night. For years, some persons had been setting explosions in my normally very quiet neighborhood and also loudly squealing their car tires. Hangup phone calls would sometimes be made to me 1 minute before the explosions. The explosions were often followed by the sound of a motorcycle driving nearby my residence. While the explosions and tire-squealing incidents occurred at different times of night, they followed an easy to recognize pattern based on the number "3090." For years, I was employed writing programs for IBM 3090 mainframes at Kaiser HMO.

Updated February 4th 2007: When I worked for Kaiser, it collected timely information from large employers about the numbers of newly covered enrollees but not their names. Because large employers did not have to provide a list of names for up to approximately a year, some unscrupulous companies could tell employees they had Kaiser coverage while paying premiums for only a fraction of them. When these unpaid-for employees showed up at Kaiser claiming to be covered, Kaiser assumed they were part of the pool of employees whose premiums had been paid but for whom it had no names and routinely issued them HMO membership cards. Companies which were thought by some at Kaiser to be engaged in this fraud had large employee turnover, so many of their employees would quit without Kaiser learning of their identity. Wards, which is a now defunct national retailer, was one of the companies I heard named as seeming to be engaged in this fraud. A large employer had only to pay premiums on a sufficiently large fraction of new hires to avoid becoming too obvious. This type of deficient accounting was an opportunity for collusion between persons at Kaiser and suspect firms to divert funds for personal benefit.

Updated December 1st 2006: Added photos I took at Mission and 18th streets in San Francisco in the mid-afternoon of August 15th 2006 hours before a father reported that his baby had been kidnapped there. Police dispute the father's account. What is certain is that the baby was found dead and the father claimed the child had been kidnapped during the evening while left unattended in a car at Mission and 18th streets. I am including this item only for completeness.

Updated November 4th 2006: A bomb recently exploded outside of an Internet based business. The name of the business and the surname of a former Kaiser programmer I worked with sound identical. The name is uncommon. I am including this item only for completeness.

Updated October 14th 2006: Added a photo of a phone kiosk which was used in a kidnapping of an adult while I frequented a cafe across the street. This account is based on my recollection of a news account.

Updated October 13th 2006: Added a short audio clip of a San Francisco Municipal Railway train operator telling his passengers including me that there had been a bomb threat. The bomb threat had occurred soon after I left a SF Muni subway station for an appointment and I first learned of it when I returned to the station from my appointment. This incident occurred May 5th 2005. The audio clip is near the bottom of this page.

Updated October 12th 2006: Years ago (5 years ago?) Kidnappers used a pay phone across the street from a restaurant I frequently patronized. The victim of the kidnapping was a large investor or owner or corporate officer of a steel making plant (in Contra Costa County?) I am including this item ONLY FOR COMPLETENESS.

Updated October 11th 2006: Posted a copy of my library records. Apparently, two phone calls I received regarding landscaping and a robbery at the home of Dr. Jeffrey Pearl occurred soon after I borrowed books with "Pearl" and "Perl" in their titles. Audio clips of these calls to my answering machine are posted near the bottom of this page.

Updated September 26th 2006: Replaced a photo of May 15th 2006 fire scene near "Jew Kod" graffiti with one of wider scope. Updated caption beneath picture of arson fire at Sigmund Stern Grove to disclose that the arson occurred just yards from a children's play area. ( Added October 11th, 2006: In the past, I received calls where an anonymous caller played recordings of childrens voices.)

News article August 10th 2006:

"Kaiser to Pay Record $2-Million Fine for Kidney Program

Kaiser Permanente has agreed to pay a $2-million fine after state HMO regulators found that its Northern California kidney transplant program imperiled hundreds of patients, in some cases delaying critical surgeries or losing track of patients altogether, four people familiar with the deal said. . . . In Kaiser's program, twice as many patients died on the waiting list last year as received kidneys, The Times found. The statewide pattern was the reverse: Twice as many patients received kidneys as died."

The full online article from the Los Angeles Times is at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-kaiser10aug10,0,3276737.story?coll=la-home-local

UPDATED September 15th 2006: Yesterday a person involved with a long-running series of explosions over the span of years was apparently in my neighborhood again. His return comes after a long absence. At approximately 1:50 a.m. this person drove near Vicente Street making loud squealing sounds with his car. Similar squeals often occurred in the past immediately following explosions. Approximately eight hours later, police found three silverish tubes taped together near Bosworth and Arlington streets. Police treated the item as a bomb, though it proved to be non-explosive. I routinely transact business near Bosworth and Arlington streets and had planned to be there on the 14th. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Here is a detail which may be significant. What looked like a mechanical boom had recently been parked in the off-street parking area visible from Bosworth and Arlington streets. It was parked alongside a recently completed apartment building. It was painted blue and may have been a Hertz rental unit. (See photos and descriptions below for more on incidents near mechanical booms.)

UPDATED July 13th 2006: Yesterday, I encountered a fire extinguisher which had been discharged on a lawn and left there in a disassembled state. The two fire extinguisher components pointed at the pre-school across the street. The fire extinguisher was a red Kidde brand unit. This scenario is consistent with threats by a Kaiser employee I worked with who said she could paralyze Kaiser programmers like me by making us see the colors red over green. I have posted two photos near the bottom of this page.

UPDATED June 29th & June 27th 2006: "A pile of wood chips roughly the size of a football field caught fire Monday afternoon [June 19th] in Martinez and was anticipated to burn into the night and possibly the next few days." This fire was reported exactly one week to the hour (3:04 p.m. according to one news report) after a tree-related incident near an elementary school (3:00 p.m.) Two photos taken near the elementary school are near the bottom of this page. The fire near 1000 Central Avenue in Martinez at Henry's Wood Farm was two miles from Kaiser Foundation Hospital Martinez located at 200 Muir Road. See:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/local/states/california/14859392.htm

http://www.shayden.com/_HenrysWoodFarms/contact_us.htm

UPDATED May 31st 2006: Added additional photos of a fire which occurred on May 25th 2006 at PRECISELY the same location as an incident involving the San Francisco Fire Department one block from where I walking in December 2005 (probably December 2nd 2005.)

UPDATED May 25th 2006: Two fires recently broke out within minutes of one another near businesses where both I and another Kaiser programming department employee had worked while we were students. These fires were near the Ashby BART station and Essex Street in Berkeley. As Kaiser employees we both worked at Kaiser's programming offices in Oakland. During a strike we both worked at Kaiser's main San Francisco campus. He also worked in a Kaiser department with the husband of a woman who claimed that I was a "spy for Kaiser management." Possibly this is just coincidence.

UPDATED May 15th 2006: I encountered two fires today at locations I routinely visit. Hopefully these were coincidences. One fire was around the corner from an office I visited. Graffiti including "Jew" in green and possibly "KOP" or "KOD" in red had previously been scrawled near the fire scene. ("Jew Kod" might suggest "Jew Dok" or "Jew Doc.") Later I encountered a smokey, smelly fire at a gas station one block from where I regularly shop. I have posted pictures of the first fire scene and the graffiti. Also, posted an additional photo of the Hertz Equipment Rental lot which had been the scene of an earlier explosion and fire previously described here.

UPDATED May 7th 2006: Years ago, a mainstream newspaper published letters on its letters to the editor page written by me critical of a right wing paramilitary group. The group practiced war games in remote areas of California and the western U.S. and stockpiled weapons and ammunition. I met approximately six times with an outspoken member of this group who believed that the U.S. was about to be invaded and that Jews and blacks were plotting the overthrow of Christian civilization. I am noting this only for completeness.

The incidents described here arose from my work at Kaiser and not from my criticisms of a paramilitary group.

UPDATED May 6th 2006: When I first met with an arson investigator at the San Francisco Fire Department, he told me that somebody had set off explosions as he left his home to go to work that day. He said he believed that the explosions were deliberately set for him. He also said that he was not going to investigate those explosions because (I believe these were his exact words) "there is simply too much of this stuff going on" and "every high school kid knows how to make a pipe bomb." He and his partner declined to investigate my concerns attributing the events I described to random acts by teenagers.

These arson investigators were painting their offices when I arrived and when I left. Having fresh paint on their walls was a higher priority for them than investigating my concerns.

UPDATED April 14th 2006: Posted a photo of a prospective Home Depot site in San Francisco. The names of my Kaiser supervisor and his wife and later an oversized gasoline can had been conspicuous yards from here. A property manager told me that someone had tried to start a fire nearby.

UPDATED April 7th 2006: A counselor at a school I attended was charged with defrauding the Army of $2.8 million by filing fake medical claims during the time I attended the school. The counselor was charged along with an accomplice of getting 59 false medical claims approved between 1991 and 1994. According to the San Francisco Examiner in an article of January 27, 1998 the counselor and his accomplice "altered legitimate medical claims that had been submitted to the hospital (Letterman Army Medical Center) and got checks made out to two friends who posed as doctors, the indictment said." I have included a scan of this article below. See "Counselor charged with defrauding Army" below.

UPDATED April 6th 2006: I previously posted an entry about an arson fire at a Thrifty Drug store while it was under construction. I realized today that I had worked for a corporation whose stores became Thrifty Drug stores.

UPDATED April 4th 2006: Briefly noted that I did some work for the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. I worked at HAFC while their administrative offices had temporarily relocated to the Laurel Heights Campus of the UCSF Medical Center following a fire. Recently, when a substantial embezzlement was reported at HAFC a bomb threat was made to an organization which had been its neighbor near UCSF. While I worked at HAFC I frequently visited that organization.

UPDATED April 4th 2006: Added a call from "Funky Worm" who, based on his other calls, may be selling heroin or other illegal drugs at a clinic. The audio clip is labelled "Funky Worm - probably a drug dealer" and is near the bottom of this page.

UPDATED MARCH 6th 2006: After I had an appointment in the Nuclear Medicine Department at San Francisco General Hospital, a physician in the department was slain. There is probably no connection between these events. However, for completeness I am noting the appointment and murder here. I've included the appointment reminder left on my answering machine as an audio clip labelled "Nuclear Medicine Appointment Reminder" near the bottom of this page.

UPDATED MARCH 1st 2006: Yesterday, a message from a stranger regarding a robbery was left on my voice mail system. The caller apparently believed he was leaving a message for a neighbor of Dr. Jeffrey Pearl, a physician at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. I am concerned about the phone calls which have been made to my phone number by physicians' offices trying to reach their patients and calls, such as this one, which are personal in nature and intended for a neighbor of a physician. I've included an excerpt from the message near the bottom of this page as an mp3 audio clip labelled "Robbery Call."

UPDATED FEBRUARY 26th 2006: Please listen to the audio clip labelled "Call - Selling Heroin at Clinic" near the bottom of this page. In listening to this recording, you should know that a "dime bag" or "dime" for short is heroin or another unlawful drug packaged for sale at about $10.

UPDATED FEBRUARY 16th 2006: In 2004, a security guard at El Dorado Hospital in Tuscon made a false claim that her hospital was going to be bombed. Federal authorities need to investigate.

UPDATED FEBRUARY 10th 2006: Added a phone message from a stranger regarding landscaping done at a physician's home. The caller provided the physician's first and last name and the name of the street where he lives. I have provided an excerpt as an audio clip near the bottom of this page labelled "Call for Dr. Pearl's neighbor."

UPDATED DECEMBER 26th 2005: Added photos related to a recent explosion and fire in San Francisco. See photos near bottom of this page.

UPDATED DECEMBER 26th 2005: Fraudulent charges for automobile related expenses in Virginia were recently made to a credit card issued to a member of my household. The day before this transaction, I received messages on my answering machine in Cantonese and English. The messages are difficult to understand. The caller self-identified as being at a garage and left an engine number, a social security number, and a birth date for somebody I do not know. I have posted an audio clip of these calls labelled "Calls Received 1 Day Before Fraud" in the section headed "AUDIO CLIPS --- MP3 FORMAT" near the bottom of this page.

UPDATED DECEMBER 20th 2005: Recently, explosions occurred at a company whose equipment is in use at a construction site in my neighborhood. Not far from the construction site, a hedge was previously set on fire. I've included a photo near the bottom of this page.

UPDATED DECEMBER 16th 2005: As I reported here earlier, soon after I inquired about briefly staying in a San Francisco hotel a major blaze damaged an apartment building very close to the hotel. An acquaintance who is staying in that hotel tells me that the unit across from hers recently caught on fire. The fire was caused by a candle and broke out one day after the fire sprinkler system had been disabled for maintenance. It involved one fatality and extensive property damage.

UPDATED NOVEMBER 15th 2005: A Kaiser employee who alleged that I was a "spy for Kaiser management" claimed that Kaiser managers were "bozos" and "sickos." Graffiti consisiting of "BOZO" and "MALO" was painted at various sites I frequented. At one location where "BOZO" and "MALO" were painted, there were incidents several times weekly for months. I've added two photos of this graffiti near the bottom of this page.

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2nd 2005: Last year, a security person employed at a hospital in Arizona made a false claim that her hospital was going to be bombed. Federal authorities should investigate. What kind of hospital would continue to employ a security person who falsely claimed that her hospital was going to be bombed?

UPDATED AUGUST 22nd 2005. Added a photo of site of a recent arson fire which was set at a children's playground adjacent to Ulloa Elementary School hours after I had a conversation with a parent there.

RECENT SIGNIFICANT UPDATES: (Caution: There is some redundancy here. I have no plans for extensive editing of this web site.)

Fire trucks responded to a false alarm at San Francisco General Hospital in January 2005 several minutes after my arrival at a cafe across the street from the hospital.

A San Francisco subway station was evacuated due to a bomb threat minutes after I exited it in early May 2005.

Hours after I had a brief conversation with a parent on August 9th 2005 at Ulloa Elementary School in San Francisco, a shopping cart was set on fire in the children's playground.

A community center located across the street from a site where I worked received a bomb threat.

A business where I worked received a threat.

The names of one of my former Kaiser supervisors and his wife were posted at the prospective and controversial site of a "big box" store in San Francisco. Later, I noticed that a large gasoline can identical in appearance to ones left repeatedly at another location I frequent --- only larger --- was left in front of the "big box" site. In San Francisco, at least one controversial chain store --- a Thrifty Drug store under construction on Haight Street --- was the victim of what was reportedly an arson fire. I have no firm opinion about this incident. However, I contacted the "big box" store to express my concern.

A physician who worked in a department which I visited a few weeks ago was murdered on May 19th. See: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/24/BAGTFCTOL01.DTL

One site of many of the explosions described on this web site is used as a children's activity camp near my residence each summer. In the past, I have received phone calls where recordings of children's voices were played. I found it puzzling that somebody would call me and play recordings of children's voices. The "connection" between these phone calls and the numerous explosions near my residence is probably just a coincidence as the world is full of coincidences. Nevertheless, because children and explosions are a potentially dangerous combination, I will post these phone calls near the bottom of this web page as I am able to locate them. Most of these recordings have probably been lost. Some of these phone calls were recordings played over the phone rather than live calls from children. I could hear the abrupt audio transitions caused by rough splices in the recording the caller was playing. Some of the calls may have been made multiple times using the same recordings. In some calls, a woman can be heard in the background, possibly coaxing a child.

Some of the other phone calls posted near the bottom of this page demonstrate that patient records in various medical offices have been altered so that my personal information has replaced that of patients. Hopefully, only contact information rather than actual medical data has been altered.

===============================================

This web site includes information about bomb threats at and near Kaiser Permanente hospital facilities and other hospitals, suspicious fires, intimidation of health care workers, and problems in Kaiser Permanente's hospital information systems. Some incidents at San Francisco General Hospital and the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco are also included.

Approximately one hour before I was scheduled to look for irregularities in Kaiser HMO's computer systems, a gunman fired a sawed-off shotgun in my general direction. A bizarre Kaiser employee s whom I worked with said that I was a spy for Kaiser management and that I should be taken out and shot. She also said I was a "gunslinger" hired by Kaiser to get rid of employees. She said that she could paralyze Kaiser programmers by making us see the colors red over green. Standing a short distance from the man who fired the sawed-off shot gun at me was a man wearing a bright, garish red shirt and green pants who left the scene immediately after the shots were fired.

For years after this shooting incident, frequent explosions, a long running spate of false fire alarms, occasional fires, and other intimidating acts occurred at venues and along routes I frequented. At Kaiser, a supervisor described me as a "walking hostage," the Personnel Department told to take a different route to work daily and to buy a nondescript car which could not be easily singled out in traffic. A Kaiser manager described one Kaiser data processing employee with whom I worked as being so dangerous that she had to be under twenty-four hour surveillance.

Two unmanned California Highway Patrol cruisers were parked near my Concord residence, twenty-four hours daily for about two weeks, a move which did little to stop ongoing intimidation. As I left the Kaiser data center one evening, a Walnut Creek police car pulled up in front of a woman who had often watched the Kaiser data center and my apartment; I continued on my way without pausing.

SELECTED ITEMS:

Updated November 12th 2007: Added photo taken before a childrens' plastic slide in the San Francisco city park at 1500 Vicente Street was torched by an arsonist. The plastic slide reportedly melted and flowed to the ground. This is the 3rd arson in childrens' play areas on Vicente Street and nearby Sigmund Stern Grove with photos posted on this website.

Posted June 20th, 2006: I am including this news item only for completeness. It is likely to be only a coincidence. "A pile of wood chips roughly the size of a football field caught fire Monday afternoon in Martinez and was anticipated to burn into the night and possibly the next few days." This fire was reported exactly one week to the hour after an incident near an elementary school which I had recorded near the bottom of this page with two photos. See:

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/local/states/california/14859392.htm

http://www.shayden.com/_HenrysWoodFarms/contact_us.htm

Posted May 20, 2005: A physician in a department which I visited a few weeks ago was murdered yesterday. This is probably just a coincidence.

Posted May 9, 2005: A bomb threat resulted in evacuation of a San Francisco subway station last week soon after I exited it for a short 9:30 a.m. appointment nearby. The station was functioning normally when I exited but had been evacuated when I returned. At least four stations were evacuated due to this threat. Probably this is a coincidence, but that determination has to await the outcome of an investigation.

(For what it's worth, In the mid-90's I was present at the collision of two San Francisco Municipal Railway trains at the intersection of Sloat Boulevard and West Portal Avenue. One train was switched into the path of a train travelling in the opposite direction. I was on a bus a few car lengths from the scene of the accident Not far away, the West Portal subway station had been tagged with the same "CLNER" graffiti left near the Bank of America and California State Automobile Association data centers in San Francisco and along Vicente Street in San Francisco. I pointed out the graffiti to the West Portal station agent.)

Posted April 9, 2006: An audio clip of a San Francisco MUNI Railway train entering disaster prevention mode and being thrown into a hard stop by a computer error was posted here several months ago. Had this incident occurred on a train packed with passengers, there could have been serious injuries. There are two audio clilps here. The first is of the train going into a hard stop. In the second clip you can hear the train operator saying that he is going to move the train to Forest Hill station to check if the passengers and train are okay. The audio clips are near the bottom of this page and are labelled with "MUNI" in the links.

Posted January 18, 2005: Fire engines responded to a false fire alarm today at San Francisco General Hospital within a few minutes after my arrival near the hospital. I had just entered a cafe across from SFGH at about 2:35 p.m. when I heard approaching sirens within a few minutes. Fire trucks stopped at the SFGH building one block away and at the hospital's main entrance. I handed a paper with my name on it to one fireman. Historically, there have been as many as three or more false alarms monthly over a span of months at locations I frequented. I consider this rate too high to be dismissed as mere coincidence.

Posted December 22, 2004: Here is the transcript of yet another phone call for a patient I do not know from a physician I do not know. Taken as a whole, these numerous phone calls may indicate that patient records have been tampered with in these doctors' offices. This call originated from Dr. Alireza Bagherian's office. "Hi. This message is for Edward. This is Anita calling from Dr. Bagherian's office. I was actually . . . to schedule a follow up appointment for you since you haven't been in for such a long time. If you can please call us back at 415-921-6200 so we can . . . for this week or maybe next. Please give us a call. Once again our number is 415-921-6200." I briefly noted this call as an incident in an earlier posting here on my web site, but accidentally came across the full transcript this morning and decided to post it. Also, I'd like to note that I've had my current phone number for nearly two decades, so it is unlikely that my phone number ever belonged to a patient of Dr. Bagherian. An audio clip of this call can be heard in the "Audio Clips" section near the bottom of this page.

Posted November 30th, 2004: Added this additional information about a shooting incident: "A bizarre Kaiser employee s whom I worked with said that I was a spy for Kaiser management and that I should be taken out and shot. She said that she could paralyze Kaiser programmers by making us see the colors red over green. Standing a short distance from the man who fired the sawed-off shot gun at me was a man wearing a bright, garish red shirt and green pants who left the scene immediately after the shots were fired."

Posted November 29th, 2004: Posted a threat from "Wonder Wick" and additional information about one fire. These are presented as scanned images at the bottom of this page.

Posted October 3, 2004: My phone number has erroneously appeared in records for patients at Kaiser Hospitals, the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center (UCSF), and the offices of physicians in private practice. Some of the calls received by me are listed elsewhere on this web site. The most recent call was received today from UCSF. Here is a portion of the call left on my answering machine: "Hi. This message is for Sarah (I've omitted the last name). This is Jack (I've omitted the last name) from the UCSF ... Monitoring Study. I'm calling on Sunday to give you a reminder about your appointment tomorrow Monday the 4th ... See you tomorrow ... at Moffitt Hospital." A link to this call can be found near the bottom of this page, under "Audio Clips."

Posted July 25, 2004: A fire gutted apartments near Kaiser's Walnut Creek data center several months after I started work there, many years ago. This fire was caused by candles deliberately left to burn on a couch. The wicks burned down to the couch, igniting a larger fire which destroyed dozens of units. A Kaiser employee who knew the people who started the fire described the fire's cause to me. At various times long after the fire, I was sent anonymous messages referring to "wick" and "wicks." Prior to the fire I expressed an interest in moving to that specific apartment building and I moved into one of the gutted apartments after it was rebuilt. (Mid-1980's. Palm Lake Apartments, Oak Grove Road, Concord, California.)

Posted May 8th 2006: A recent news article from CNN suggests that some arson investigations are flawed. It reports on the conclusions of an expert panel which included "veteran arson investigators and people with backgrounds in science and engineering who have taught other investigators." The article "Experts Question Arson Convictions" is at http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/05/07/arson.flawed.convictions.ap/index.html

Thursday July 1, 2004: I continue to receive calls from physicians' offices for patients I do not know. The most recent call originated June 30th from a medical office in San Francisco whose phone number is in the 921 prefix.

Friday June 25, 2004: A bomb threat was recently phoned to the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco which I frequently visited while working across the street at the Laurel Heights campus of the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center for a non-profit agency. A financial officer of this agency, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, was charged with embezzlement yesterday. During the time I worked there, its administrative offices had been temporarily relocated at the Laurel Heights campus of UCSF following a fire.

Wednesday June 23, 2004: Added photo of a recent fire.

Thursday June 17, 2004: An individual who set numerous explosions in my neighborhood over the course of many years was again, apparently, in the neighborhood on Saturday June 5th from 12:10 a.m. to 12:15 a.m. and again at 11:54 p.m. On Sunday June 6th, he showed up here at 4:39 a.m., 12:19 p.m. and 12:38 p.m. Instead of loud explosions, he now simply makes strange noises. He has also shown up near the faculty club at the UCSF Medical Center where he has left blood red objects.

Wednesday May 26, 2004. An individual who set numerous explosions in my neighborhood over the course of many years was again, apparently, in the neighborhood on Saturday May 22nd at 12:10 a.m. and 11:54 p.m.

Thursday May 20, 2004 "A soon-to-be-released study reveals what some identity theft experts have hinted at for years -- the crime is largely the work of insiders. In a study of more then 1,000 identity theft arrests in the United States, Michigan State professor Judith Collins has discovered that perhaps as much as 70 percent of all identity theft starts with theft of personal data from a company by an employee. . . Most of the crimes began at health care or financial companies, Collins found in her study. In most cases, temporary workers or employees stealing data from other departments were to blame." See "Study: ID Theft Usually an Inside Job" at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5015565/

Sunday, May 16, 2004: An individual who set numerous explosions in my neighborhood over the course of many years was again, apparently, in the neighborhood at 2:57 a.m. and 3:48 p.m. today.

Sunday, May 16, 2004: Somebody has spoofed my e-mail address and is sending out virus laden e-mails. The e-mails appear to come from my e-mail account, jimristrem@earthlink.net, but inspection of the headers shows they come from elsewhere. Virus laden e-mails also appear to originate from jimristrem.net. I have no connection whatsoever with jimristrem.net. Over the past two days, I have been notified of 15 such e-mails.

Sunday, December 18, 2003: During and soon after the massive Oakland Hills fire approximately ten years ago, I received multiple, anonymous messages referring to "Kaiser," "Spy," and "Vicente" all of which are the names of places in a small area just north of the fire area. These places are Spyglass hill which overlooks Kaiser School, Vicente Road, Vicente Street, and Vicente Place. At that time I was living near Vicente Street in San Francisco where six to eight explosions typically occurred nearly every week during the late 1980's, throughout the 1990's, and into the early 2000's. Doing the math, that's roughly 3000 explosions during the 1990's alone.

Saturday, December 13, 2003: Posted photos of the most recent fire I encountered on my regular walking route. Just yards from the fire were conspicuous red and green objects, consistent with past threats to paralyze Kaiser programmers by making them see the colors red over green. Although it may not appear green on your monitor, the large, permanent utility box standing alongside the red pipe is dark green.

Wednesday, December 3, 2003: I continue to receive more than my share of inquiries from persons who self-identify as insurance company employees wanting information about auto accidents that I know nothing about involving people I do not know. The most recent incident occurred in November. See below.

Thursday, November 27, 2003: Another fire happened in the past few weeks. This one gutted a story of a building along one of my preferred walking routes. Firefighting efforts were underway as I walked by. The fire occurred just yards from large, conspicuous red and green objects, consistent with past threats.

April 22, 2003: From the New York Times: "In the largest Medicaid fraud settlement, Bayer agreed yesterday to pay the government $257 million and pleaded guilty to a criminal charge after engaging in what federal prosecutors said was a scheme to overcharge for the antibiotic Cipro.
According to documents turned over to the government by a whistle-blower, Bayer was coached in the scheme by a purchasing manager from Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health care organizations." See update #15 below.

The evaluation I received from Kaiser on leaving was excellent (a recruiter at Kaiser's Personnel Department who read it described it as "beautiful.") After I quit Kaiser, I was hired as a computer programmer by a firm with contracts with the Federal government (including the military), state governments, and private insurers. This firm was engaged by clients to look for medical fraud and abuse. However, changing jobs and moving to a new location did not stop the incidents which I describe here.

Among additional problems, the management of Kaiser has allowed bad data to enter medical databases. Lax policies undermine the integrity, accuracy, and privacy of computer systems at Kaiser HMO, Kaiser Permanente Hospitals, Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser Division of Research, and Kaiser Health Plan.

Many of the events described here occurred at Kaiser's information technology center in Walnut Creek, California. Kaiser facilities in Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, the Mid-Atlantic, the Northwest, Ohio and California are now served by Kaiser's information technology centers in Walnut Creek and Corona, California. Kaiser's major IT centers in other states have been dismantled.

I have opted to include news items about non-Kaiser facilities when they illuminate problems at Kaiser HMO. For similar reasons, I have included information about criminal activity and other troubling events at Kaiser in departments other than computer services.

NEWS:

Posted April 6, 2005: "However, Orgill said actual data for thousands of UCSF [Medical Center] students, faculty and staffers was in fact being stored, and the hacker may have had access to this data for hours before the intrusion was detected. . . Orgill said it's unknown whether any confidential info was downloaded by the hacker because the server doesn't contain software that would provide this level of security. . . the custodians of our data have clearly proven themselves unworthy of the honor system." The aricle continues, "Falkell also saw what appeared to be the names and Social Security numbers of a handful of Kaiser Permanente members. 'There's all kinds of personal information,' she told me. 'You can read it clearly. It looks like quite a bit of juicy stuff.' " See "Another incident for UC" by David Lazarus, Wednesday, April 6, 2005, in the online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/04/06/BUGEOC3L5N1.DTL

Posted March 31, 2005: My contact information has been entered into clients' records at Bank of America. I have repeatedly received calls in the past from personal bankers at Bank of America attempting to contact their clients. Today I received another call from Bank of America. Here is an excerpt from the call: "Hello. This is Sarah from Bank of America's Insurance Services Department. We service the insurance for the loan on your structure. During a recent audit of the loan file on your account, we discovered that current information on insurance coverage was missing or incomplete." I have neither insurance nor a loan through Bank of America. My contact information also has erroneously appeared in records in physicians' offices, hospitals, and automobile insurers. I have posted an audio recording of this phone call. You can listen to it by clicking on the "March 31,2005 Bank of America Call" link near the bottom of this page.

Posted January 1, 2005: On December 4th, 2004 I received a single phone call where the caller identified herself with only a first name which is the same as a person I worked with at Kaiser on the Admit, Discharge, and Transfer system (ADT.) The same caller phoned here once years ago and identified herself with the same name. Later on December 4th, there were explosions in PRECISELY the same pattern as FREQUENT explosions which occurred multiple times weekly over past decades. However, the explosions on December 4th were not nearly as loud as ones in the past. One pair of explosions was at 10:39 p.m. from the direction of Sigmund Stern Grove (louder) and the other at 10:45 p.m. was from the opposite direction from my location (much softer.) The PATTERN of the timing of the phone call and explosions was the same pattern used for past explosions.

Posted December 25, 2004: Last Thursday I made an inquiry about a hotel. Hours later, a major fire broke out a short distance from the same hotel. Cause of the fire remains unknown, according to the fire department. Probably, this is a coincidence and not a case of arson. However, because so many things have gone wrong I remain concerned about this fire.

Posted December 11, 2004: Single explosion this morning at 1:39 a.m. While loud, it was not powerful as it failed to create the sustained resonance which accompanied past explosions. There was another explosion at 10:40 p.m. It was barely audible from my residence and may have occurred in Sigmund Stern Grove.

Posted November 29, 2004: Added a scan of a threat received from "Wonder Wick." Also, added a scan of notes made on May 1st, 1984 about a fire and other incidents that occurred on April 26th, 1984. See below.

Posted September 6, 2004: A single loud explosion occurred approximately a half block from my residence at 1:04 a.m. Multiple loud squeals from a car caused by skidding and mechanical problems occurred from 1:20 a.m. through 1:24 a.m., at 2:35 a.m. and 2:44 a.m. In the past, pairs of explosions were followed within minutes by loud squeals from a car multiple times weekly over a period of months.

Posted September 21, 2004: Firemen arrived at approximately 9:30 a.m. at Ulloa School on Vicente Street two or so minutes after I walked by the school . According to a fire department person at the scene, the false alarm was caused by a mistake during system testing. Specifically, the school's fire alarm system had not been successfully disconnected while it was being tested. (Photo below.)

Posted September 3, 2004: A single loud explosion occurred approximately a half-block from my home at 1:27 a.m. Earlier in the evening at 11:03 p.m., a dozen or so explosions occurred within seconds elsewhere in my neighborhood.

I'd also like to point out that an individual who watched the entrance to Ulloa School on Vicente Street for months, possibly as long as a year, is likely one of the group of people responsible for setting explosions. She would stand within yards of the entrance of the apartment building at 3090 Vicente Street, San Francisco, watching the entrance to Ulloa School during school hours.

Posted August 20, 2004: Somebody recently attempted to start a fire at a house located two blocks from my residence.

Posted February 22, 2004: Firemen arrived at the scene of a false alarm one-half block from where I was walking at approximately 2:10 p.m. this afternoon. According to a fire department person at the scene, the false alarm was caused by an automated alarm system. I've worked in central offices with alarm circuits and know from my training just how easy it is for an individual using no special skill to deliberately cause a false alarm. I've also heard from a programmer who has written software for commercial alarm centers about software quality issues. I have no opinion about this particular false alarm. But, in the past false alarms occurred at fire alarm boxes two or three times a month for many months short distances from a stretch of six blocks or so that I routinely walked a half-dozen or more times a month.

Posted February 20, 2004: Again, appointment information was left on my answering machine for a patient I do not know. Here is an excerpt: "This is Dr. Schwartz's office calling for Mike (I've omitted the last name.) calling of his eye appointment...." I've received other calls from Dr. Schwartz for different patients. (Caller-ID display shown below.)  A link to an audio clip of this call is posted near the bottom of this page in the "Audio Clips" section.

Posted November 10, 2003:   Over the years, a long running series of false fire alarms and occasional fires occurred along my regular routes. There were simply too many false fire alarms to have occurred by chance.   A Kaiser computer center employee who exhibited bizarre, threatening behavior who said I was a "spy for Kaiser management" also said that Kaiser's computer systems smelled like "smoldering garbage." I believe there is a link between one bizarre Kaiser employee that I worked with and these fires.    See the updates near the bottom of this page, including a photo of the gasoline can left at precisely the location where many dozens of incidents occurred previously and afterwards.

Posted October 24, 2003: Patient appointment information continues to be left on my telephone answering system at home. The two latest incidents involve patients for a Kaiser physician with a name that sounds like Dr. Hurr and a non-Kaiser physician, Dr. Lee K Schwartz. I've received other calls from Dr. Schwartz's office for different patients. See the updates at the bottom of this page which include a transcript of what was said during the calls and a photo of one incoming call displayed on my caller-id unit. Audio clips of these calls are posted under "Audio Clips" near the bottom of this page.

Posted October 22, 2003: From an e-mail received by the University of California: "Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed . . . I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet." This incident illuminates my concerns that Kaiser was vulnerable to large scale theft of computerized patient records.    The San Francisco Chronicle published an article about UCSF's patient records exposures at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/22/MNGCO2FN8G1.DTL

See "Transcription Puts Patients' Data at Risk" at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/28/BUGUP2KD3B1.DTL&type=business

Posted October 9, 2003: FBI names suspect in Shaklee & Chiron bombings.
See: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/6973707.htm

Posted September 26, 2003: A bomb exploded at Shaklee Corporation's headquarters this morning. This bombing has no relationship to the explosions directed at me, but it does illustrate the use of intimidation targeted at employees by a rogue group in order to exact demands from a business.   From an e-mail sent by the group claiming responsibility for the bombs and threatening to target employees: "You never know when your house, your car even, might go boom." It is only a coincidence, but I was interviewed for employment at Shaklee at approximately the same time I applied for employment at Kaiser HMO. See
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/09/26/bomb26.DTL

Posted September 5, 2003: A group which recently claimed responsibility for exploding pipe bombs outside the Chiron Corporation in Emeryville, California, is threatening to target Chiron's employees at their homes. The events at Chiron have nothing to do with me, but they are reminiscent of events at Kaiser HMO where I was described as a "walking hostage," told to take precautions such as taking a different route to work each day, and where explosions occurred — and continue to occur --- near various locations I frequent. A news article on the Chiron explosions is available at: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/cctimes/news/6639706.htm
(The text of an e-mail from the Animal Liberation Brigade is available at http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/6902512.htm )

Posted June 7, 2003: There was an explosion near my residence on Friday, June 6 at 11:30 p.m. It was loud enough to be heard throughout my home and sounded like it was directly in front of the house and very close. This is just the latest in THOUSANDS of loud explosions that have occurred near my various residences in various cities since the mid-1980's.

Posted June 5, 2003: When I provided programming coverage on Kaiser's clinical laboratories' statistical reporting system, I observed these shortcomings: (1) program runtime errors were unchecked for up to 14 days or longer --- the average was probably more than seven days; (2) the programmer routinely assigned to the system said that he was not able to learn of runtime errors on a timely basis because of deficiencies in the operations center. (I suggested to the programmer that he should have the job control messages including warning and error messages directed to a local printer where he could pick them up very soon after the programs ran. He showed no interest in the suggestion and continued to wait for weeks for the job control messages to be transferred to microfiche and then delivered to the programmers' library where he could look at them after an unacceptable delay.); (3) the regularly assigned programmer also complained about his data disappearing, which he claimed was due to computer operators stopping programs and then restarting them in the wrong step and what he characterized as inappropriate use of generation data groups; (4) an unofficial set of documentation was kept apart from the official documentation. Each one of these problems is intolerable in any hospital environment.

The set of off-the-record documentation for the clinical labs' statistical reporting system nearly filled one large binder that I looked at. There were additional volumes, but I chose not to open them. The programmer who created and kept possession of this shadow documentation boasted that nobody else could understand it. Such secrecy undermines the whole purpose of documentation which is supposed to be open to and understandable by other programmers and by auditors. A person in a supervisory position asked me to secretly copy it and obviously felt intimidated by the clinical labs' programmer. I am sure that Kaiser's auditors had no idea this shadow documentation existed.

Later, I will add my observations on "shadow systems" at Kaiser. These were unofficial, manual systems created by hospital staff to compensate for deficiencies in the computer systems or for the poor training staff received in the proper use of these systems.

Posted June 1, 2003: Appointment information for patients has been left in my voice mailbox at my residence on several occasions. This should not be happening as it violates the privacy patients expect. I have posted the contents of one such message in update #18.

Posted May 19, 2003: Technicians abroad will shortly be able to remotely access confidential patient records on Kaiser's 8.3 million members, 135,000 employees and 11,000 physicians. These technicians are not under direct control of Kaiser because they are not Kaiser employees. They are not bound by U.S. laws. There is plenty of room here for mischief and no sign that Kaiser is adequately prepared to guard against abuse. See update #17, below.

Posted May 6, 2003: Kaiser orderly convicted of receiving 20,000 Ecstasy tablets at a Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.   Optimists will say that this arrest demonstrates that Kaiser is in control of its drugs. I am not an optimist on this issue. See update #16, below.

Posted April 22, 2003: Largest Medicaid Fraud Settlement Ever. "Bayer Agrees to Pay U.S. $257 Million in Drug Fraud . . . . According to documents turned over to the government by a whistle-blower, Bayer was coached in the scheme by a purchasing manager from Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health care organizations." (NY Times, April 17, 2003.) See update #15, below.

Posted April 22, 2003: From an article in August, 2000: "Kaiser Permanente violated the patient confidentiality of hundreds of members last week when e-mails containing sensitive medical information, names and home phone numbers were mistakenly sent to the wrong people, Kaiser officials disclosed yesterday. . . . the error affected 858 members before Kaiser's online support crew caught the mistake and shut down the program. Had the tech workers not spotted the problem, it could have affected more than 8,000 members who were receiving e-mail responses at the time." Please see the article, "Errant E-Mails Violate Privacy of Kaiser Members" in the San Francisco Chronicle at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/08/10/MN56245.DTL

Posted March 18, 2003: On March 13th, Kaiser's computer systems caused medication errors. Kaiser did not discover the error until the day after it occurred. Kaiser waited four days to go public with the news. According to an early news article in the San Francisco Chronicle, "As many as 4,700 Kaiser patients received prescriptions that were possibly mislabeled after the HMO's Northern California pharmacy computer system suffered a power outage on Thursday." See update #14, below.

Posted February 22, 2003: Added an explanation in the section "My Work at Kaiser" of how Kaiser effectively disabled its security on our project. Kaiser management lifted major barriers to theft of confidential medical data complete with patient medical record numbers.

Posted February 14, 2003: Star Systems, an ATM network, estimates that nearly 12 million Americans have been victims of identity theft with a total financial loss of $23 billion. But in 2000, there were only 922 identity theft arrests. See update #13.

Posted February 4, 2003: A Kaiser HMO employee stole more than $500,000 from a credit card processing terminal at a Kaiser facility. See update #12.

Posted February 4, 2003: Kaiser HMO will announce it will buy an electronic medical records package from Epic Systems Corporation and "and abandon a decade long effort to develop such a system itself." Kaiser has an awful history of buying software packages with bad results. See update #11.

Posted January 16, 2003: Minnesota's Attorney General raps Kaiser's new CEO. The Attorney General criticizes Kaiser's new CEO for his management of an HMO in Minnesota, including inappropriate payments to a computer consultant and allowing disclosure of private medical information of patients to third parties such as survey firms. See update #10.

Posted December 28, 2002: Computer theft poses risk to 30,000 in S. Ariz. enrolled in TriCare Prime and TriCare Prime Remote managed care plans. See update #9.

MY WORK AT KAISER:

I have had face to face encounters with criminals who penetrated hospital computer systems. They had full employee access to programming offices at Kaiser HMO, unlike regular hackers who do their work remotely.

On one occasion, an hour or so before I was scheduled to look for billing and hospitalization discrepancies at Kaiser, a gunman fired in my direction with a sawed-off shotgun. A few weeks later, the first of many explosions was set off in a building where I was, across the street from one of the Kaiser Permanente hospitals. I received death threats and was subjected to intimidation by the HMO's own employees to discourage me from talking to auditors. In another incident, one of them intercepted copies of a report I had prepared, tearing off pages, lying to me about it, and refusing to provide me pertinent information. This specific report included a warning of problems at Kaiser involving hospitalization and billing discrepancies.

These types of incidents are not limited to Kaiser. According to an article in an AMA publication, "The University of Washington Medical Center, after some prodding, acknowledged that a hacker had infiltrated its computer system last year, stealing confidential records of thousands of patients . . . The intrusion at the University of Washington Medical Center was first reported on Dec. 6, 2000, by SecurityFocus.com, a Web site devoted to security issues. The academic teaching hospital initially disputed the report as 'completely inaccurate.' It acknowledged that it had detected and stopped an attempt to hack into its system last summer. It denied that the hacker had gained control of its network and said it had no evidence that any records had been stolen. But the center changed its account the next day after Seattle journalists got samples of the stolen records and presented them to the medical center for verification." (Excerpted from the article "Security breach: Hacker gets medical records" appearing in "American Medical News," a publication of the American Medical Association, published January 29, 2001.)

In another incident involving billing fraud at the University of Washington hospital, articles described a climate of fear which had been created to cover up criminal acts.

Another article published by MSNBC on November 12th, states that, "More than any American business, health care is one where fraud is rampant, simple and, by most accounts, about to get a lot more common . . . Unlike today's arcane accounting scandals, these involve out-and-out stealing . . . . The schemes are so lucrative that they've drawn criminals in the drug trade and Russian mafia. All of this raises a question: Why does the system make it so simple? . . . There are 4 billion health-care transactions every year worth a total of $1.5 trillion. Of that, experts say, between 3% and 10% is fraud, an amount unheard of in other industries."

Question: Why do we accept the assurances of an industry which is rife with fraud that its computer systems are secure? That patients' medical records are secure?

I witnessed serious security problems while working as a computer programmer/analyst on projects for Kaiser Health Plan, Kaiser Permanente Hospitals, and Permanente Medical Group. These events undermine the privacy of patient records, as well as threaten patients and hospital personnel. These privacy violations could be repeated at any hospital or medical insurance company, including yours, as their systems commonly have security flaws.

Computer systems I was assigned to at Kaiser included:
(1) clinical labs
(2) medical records management
(3) inpatient hospitalizations management
(4) a project for reporting on inpatient hospitalizations and outcomes to a commission of the California legislature.

When I quit Kaiser, I received an evaluation which an interviewer in the Personnel Department described as "beautiful." But, what I witnessed at Kaiser made me wish I had never worked there. The situations I observed at Kaiser were a nightmare.

The first system I was assigned at Kaiser was intended to track payments to non-Kaiser doctors, clinics, and other providers. Significantly, our clients --- the managers of Kaiser's reimbursement office --- were arrested and convicted of fraud, apparently because of discoveries made by others during the systems analysis phase of our project. In order for this scheme to work, these crooks at Kaiser had to access and misuse patient information. While only the office managers were arrested, this scheme could only have worked with the complicity of virtually everyone else in that office; these others continued their employment at Kaiser without being disciplined. This happened in the early 1980's. It could certainly have happened again.

A year or so later, Bay Area newspapers published articles that Kaiser's CEO had personally embezzled resources from Kaiser by directing Kaiser employees using Kaiser materials to remodel his condominium in Pebble Beach, California.

I also assisted in a study intended for the California legislature. Some people I worked with believed that our study demonstrated medical malpractice and billing fraud at Kaiser. I did not and do not share their suspicions about the specific errors we found, preferring instead to attribute the specific errors our project uncovered to Kaiser's sloppiness. Sloppiness, however, can be an excellent strategy for covering up mischief.

On our project at Kaiser for the California Legislature, we discovered hospital bills in the computer system without any matching hospitalizations. Also, for actual hospital stays, the computer system was billing for services which could not be explained even after months of effort. Computer files which would have been used to investigate these unexplained charges were missing.

During this time and afterwards, I was subjected to intimidation by a few Kaiser data processing employees. When a fellow employee discovered that I was about to visit Kaiser's internal audit department, he intimidated me. Also, in the one hour that elapsed between my two visits with the internal audit department, I received a dozen or more hang-up calls in rapid succession. For years afterwards, I received phoned death threats. Numerous explosions were set near my home, false fire alarms occurred at unusually high rates at many places I routinely visited, and there was a variety of other intimidating activities.

Our Kaiser project used IBM 3090 mainframes. At 3090 Vicente Street in San Francisco, someone marked my name and the name of my Kaiser associates on a wall. The names of these two of my Kaiser associates are unusual. One name is uncommon (Oz) and the other (Mathen) is rare. Also, the initials of my project leader (CL) were scrawled with "rage," "rape," and "ner." Other nearby properties were trashed with similar graffiti as were other buildings miles away, all of them along my customary routes, including near data centers belonging to Bank of America and the California State Automobile Association. (See the photos elsewhere on this page and on the next two pages.)

Loud explosions --- THOUSANDS of them over several decades --- were also detonated in neighborhoods where I lived and at other sites that I frequented. The pattern of the explosions shows that the person(s) setting them may be obsessed by the numbers "3" and "9.". This continued for over a decade, with multiple explosions typically three or four nights each week. After a long lapse, soon after the September 11th terrorist attacks, there was a renewal of these explosions.

I was also stalked by some persons who frequently waited in the vicinity of the Kaiser data center in Walnut Creek. In response, the California Highway Patrol parked two police cruisers at my residence, twenty-four hours daily for approximately two weeks.

One of the persons who harassed me was a Kaiser data center employee with responsibility for software which reported on patients, labs, and physicians. She claimed that I was a spy for Kaiser management. She said that she could paralyze Kaiser programmers by making them see the colors red over green. For years, nearly identical bright red plastic cups were repeatedly left along my customary routes. She also said Kaiser management consisted of "bozos" and "sickos." The words "bozo" and "malo" were painted at destinations I regularly visited. (Jumble the letters in "bozo" and "malo" and you get "boom loza.")

One manager at Kaiser's data center described this employee who was harassing me as "so dangerous that she has to be kept under twenty-four hour surveillance." A supervisor described me as being a "walking hostage." Kaiser's personnel department advised me to not walk to work or other destinations and to buy a nondescript car which could not be singled out in traffic.

At one point, this employee announced that she was going to pick up a computer tape with a full year's worth of patient data so that she could send it to the California legislature. Picking it up may have been within the scope of her job duties. ( As part of her job at Kaiser, this person had both written and phone conversations with data processing personnel at the State of California over details of this tape. Oddly, the letter I saw used her last name from her previous marriage, although in the preceding year or longer she always used her maiden name. Given her level of involvement, she may have taken possession of the tape --- not a good idea, especially under the circumstances.)

The risk here is that from a single tape copies can be made for illicit purposes. I hope she was not given possession of the tape. This tape contained the primary diagnosis, secondary diagnosis, up to five procedures, and other information for each billed inpatient stay during a twelve month period. Each occurrence of a patient medical record number was replaced with a code. The security surrounding the creation these codes was unacceptably weak in protecting patient privacy because (1) the person who created the codes was an associate of the Kaiser data processing employee who said that she was going to take possession of a copy of the tape who shared responsibilities, projects, and staff with her, (2) there was absolutely no assurance that he did not discuss the encoding scheme with her, just as he discussed it with me. Our discussion of the coding scheme pertained to avoiding data collisions. It is important not to discuss the particulars of your encoding scheme with anybody who may gain unrestricted possession of the encoded data. This is unacceptable in an environment where the patients expect the privacy of their medical data to be assured and not left to good luck. The security process surrounding creation of this tape was the data processing equivalent of hiding the keys to your house under the welcome mat.

On our project, Kaiser effectively disabled security measures by moving patient data into the programmers' personal accounts. Any programmer who worked on this project or many other projects at Kaiser could print out the confidential patient records complete with medical record numbers which uniquely identify each patient and take them home, give them to friends, pass them out on the street corner, sell them to criminals, etc. without setting off any alarms. Even the janitors had access to these confidential patient records because during this period printouts were discarded with no more security than candy wrappers.

Recently, I received an email from a medical researcher at Kaiser's Division of Research. In her first paragraph, she told me how great computer security is at Kaiser. In her second paragraph, she asked for assurance that I had not breached security on her computer system at Kaiser. (I had not.) What is wrong with this picture?

Here is what she wrote to me (I've concealed part of her e-maill address):
> On 1 Jul 2002 at 14:25, xxxxxxxxxxxx @ dor.kaiser.org wrote:
>
> > While I am interested in the well-being of patients, I have no
> > control over any of Kaiser's databases but my own. The Division of
> > Research maintains a separate computer network which ensures that
> > data we have from surveys and studies are not accessible by
> > non-Division of Research employees or anyone outside Kaiser without
> > our express delivery of it in a de-identified database. None of the
> > information from my surveys is accessible to anyone in Kaiser
> > Permanente administration in a way that identifies the provider of
> > the information, unless I've obtained permission from the provider.
> >
> > How did you get my personal email address, and who else did you send
> > this to? I want to make sure that security isn't being breached in
> > our system.
> >
> > Thanks for your reply.

This person is a medical privacy quack. Why does she think it is acceptable to keep confidential medical data on a computer system that she believes could be successfully hacked?

Hospitals do not do enough to prevent these types of crimes and police resources are stretched too thin. Given these circumstances, can any medical data center claim that it is secure? Can any hospital realistically meet patients' and physicians' expectations about the privacy of medical data? Should patients adjust their expectations downward to realistic levels?

Perhaps Kaiser should lead the way for everyone in presenting its employees, its patients, and the public with a realistic view of the limitations of computer security and privacy of patient records. Maybe they should disclose that hospitals are not particularly good at it.

If you think that computer security is not your concern, think again. Your medical data and insurance information are stored in computers. Medical, insurance, research and other systems are attractive targets for hackers and other criminals. Some of them are smart, clever, and persistent. They have only to breach security a single time to do a great deal of damage.

(Start of Updates.)

UPDATE #1
"News Briefs
October 29, 2002 Posted: 05:35:10 AM PST
Bomb threat closes Kaiser medical building
A bomb threat forced more than 100 people to evacuate the Kaiser Permanente building in downtown Modesto on Monday afternoon, officials said. Police and private security personnel searched the building at 1625 I St. but no bomb was found, Sgt. Jim Johnson said. Someone called the lab at about 1:45 p.m., told a technician there was a bomb in the building and hung up, said Dr. Donald Kimzey, medical director for Kaiser's Modesto area. An employee called police at 1:47 p.m. and the building was evacuated. There were 75 employees and approximately 40 customers inside at the time, Kimzey said. The building remained closed and is schedule to re-open today." (Quoted from the online edition of the "Modesto Bee.")

The world is full of coincidences, and imagining significant connections where there is really only coincidence seems to be a fundamental flaw in how humans process information. Nevertheless, the bomb threat was called into the lab at Modesto at a time meshes with the pattern of explosions set near my locations and the only lab at Kaiser in Modesto is likely to be a Clinical Lab. (initials "CL.") I was briefly assigned to support Kaiser's clinical labs computer applications. The letters "CL" were scrawled at many of the locations where I was stalked, where property damage was done, and near the sites where explosions were detonated. I hope the police investigators will consider the possibility of a link between the explosions near me and the bomb threats at Kaiser's Modesto campus.

UPDATE #2:
Kaiser needs to monitor its facilities, especially Modesto, for persons tampering with patient care equipment and computer equipment. A Kaiser data center employee, who exhibited bizarre and threatening behavior, said that she could paralyze Kaiser programmers by making them see the colors red over green. She also remarked often how easy it would be to tamper with equipment and computer gear in Kaiser's hospitals. (The manager of Kaiser's computerized medical records system described her as being "so dangerous that she has to be kept under twenty-four hour surveillance.") Patient care equipment and computer gear are left unattended for hours in easily accessible areas at Kaiser, as well as other hospitals.
Kaiser's security has a long history of being inadequate to deter motivated individuals bent on doing harm. It may be adequate to deter idle, curious individuals without skills. I think of Kaiser's security as being the equivalent of the scarecrows a farmer may plant in his fields. When I worked at the Kaiser data center, I observed the sole guard on a shift sleeping in his car while he was on duty. On other occasions, the guard disappeared for hours. However, the one guard who was on duty most evenings I was in the Walnut Creek data center was very conscientious.

UPDATE #3:
A motor vehicle which had regularly shown up minutes after explosions near my home was again in the neighborhood last night. It showed up at 9:39 p.m., Wednesday, October 30th.

UPDATE #4:
Somebody asked me why I do not take more pictures of the persons who have stalked me. I have good reason not to be taking many photographs of these people. While I am taking a shot of them with a camera, they may take a shot at me with a gun. In 1984, a sawed-off shotgun was fired in my direction in the hour before I was scheduled to do a monthly run of computer programs looking for irregularities in Kaiser's billing files and hospitalization files. Weeks after this shooting incident, loud explosions were set off inside a building while I was in it. This building was across the street from a Kaiser hospital. The number and pattern of the explosions match the explosions which occurred for more than a decade.
Law-enforcement made arrests and secured a conviction in the shooting, but without regard to my work at Kaiser. Had we known then what was to happen at Kaiser, I think a link to Kaiser would have been investigated.

UPDATE #5:
Kaiser HMO announced a new vice president, Bruce Turkstra, will oversee its Clinical Information System. The announcement was issued in a Kaiser press release on November 6th.

UPDATE #6:
November 21. A gunman entered a Kaiser facility in Berkeley, California. The media described the situation as an attempted hostage taking. A police standoff lasted several hours. The gunman was a former Kaiser employee. A Kaiser employee interviewed by one TV station expressed concern that the gunman had walked into secure areas of the building where he should have been stopped by security.

UPDATE #7:
Dr. Ted Cooper, MD, is Kaiser's chief proselytizer for computers in medicine. He is also national director of security and privacy at Kaiser Permanente. Dr. Cooper is shortsighted and does not understand what he is looking at.

Here are some of the events that happened at Kaiser's data center on Dr. Cooper's watch: (1) unverified data was entered in Kaiser's computerized medical files. In the specific instance that I was told about by Kaiser's own employees who heard the order being given, the operations manager was running late on data entry for the physicians' payroll. So, he chose to let unverified data flow into the medical files by transferring data entry staff from medical data entry to payroll data entry. During this period, unverified data was knowingly allowed to go into the computerized medical data files. Kaiser was voting for the accuracy of the physicians' payroll (which was scrutinized by data entry verification) and the inaccuracy in its computerized medical files (where data entry verification was suspended.) I was with a group of programmers when this incident was reported and it was greeted with laughter all around. (2) Kaiser's Medical Records Management System was sabotaged by Kaiser's own programmers. "Sabotage" is not an exaggeration. Kaiser's Medical Records Management System was supposed to be capable of running at all of Kaiser's medical facilities. What programmers actually produced was a system which was so deficient it would only run at one medical facility. It was incapable of running at multiple medical facilities because location specific code had been created for just one hospital. This location specific code required a major programming effort. Kaiser's programmers signed-off on work that had not been done and management did not catch the error until it was too late.

When Kaiser belatedly discovered that the Medical Records Management System was broken and could not work, they moved into "firefighting" mode. But their attempt at "firefighting" was hampered by the system's poor design. Rather than following industry standards and employing modular programming, Kaiser had settled on a design of writing mammoth, non-modular programs which defied effective maintenance and upgrading. This resulted in multiple programmers working on the same programs at the same time and stomping on one another, i.e., the changes that one programmer made would clobber the changes made by other programmers.

I was assigned to Kaiser's Medical Records Management System after it had been "stabilized." The project leader at the time told me that the list of bugs in the system took up 7 pages of single spaced, printed text. Each bug was described in one or two lines of text, according to the project leader. That's a lot of bugs for a system which could mean life or death for a patient.

Also, on Dr. Cooper's watch, Kaiser experienced a period when some major computers slated for implementation in the medical centers were crashing and otherwise being brought down unexpectedly in a hurry. A memo was distributed informing employees of the choice of words which were to be allowed over the data center's public address system and by staff to describe these shutdowns. The aim was to prevent visiting MD's and hospital personnel from becoming alarmed. This is a good example of the dysfunctional type of communication that thrives at Kaiser --- information about what is going bad can't get out and corrective information based on reality cannot get in.

Kaiser's physicians should have been encouraged to take more interest, not less interest, in problems with these computers. The hardware and software never fulfilled the promises which had been made. The patient data which lived on these computers was supposed to be complete and up-to-date to the hospitals. But the outside vendor (IBM) never delivered promised software which would permit these computers to talk to Kaiser's main databases. Consequently, when physicians in the hospitals accessed patient data using these computers, they got incomplete and stale information which was hours old. (This was very similar in its effects to the clinical labs fiasco described in update #11. At Kaiser's regional clinical labs center, results had to be copied to tape, and then the tapes were transported by truck from a Kaiser facility in Berkeley to the main data center in Walnut Creek, California. Kaiser's physicians were expecting rapid clinical labs results. Instead, physicians saw results that were routinely delayed for hours.)

Kaisers' physicians paid a high price because they were sheltered from bad news about developing Kaiser's computer systems. Patients also pay a high price. The fact that bad news is kept inside Kaiser is the major reason a heart surgeon with an awful record was able to leave Kaiser with a clean slate. He went to a mid-western state where he racked up the second largest number of medical malpractice cases in that state's history. Under California regulations, this doctor's troubled performance may have been required to be reported to the State of California, but it was not.

I will add more information, as time permits, on the failings of Dr. Ted Cooper's tenure at the Kaiser data center.

Dr. Cooper's watch at the Kaiser data center was scandal plagued. It is truly a demonstration that "what can go wrong will go wrong" that he is national director of security and privacy at Kaiser Permanente and past chair of the board of directors of the Computer-based Patient Records Institute.

UPDATE #8:
Here is another incident report which reveals what a zoo the Kaiser computer center had become. One Sunday morning, I was at the Kaiser data center along with the chief programmer on the Medical Records Management System ("MRMS"). A database technician informed us that something was wrong with MRMS and that it would probably need to be halted. Instead of making himself available to help with the serious problems that were developing, the senior programmer for the Medical Records Management System IMMEDIATELY left the building and headed for the parking lot. He made no effort to help. A half-dozen other members of the staff and I worked on the problem from early Sunday afternoon through Monday morning.

You know you've got problems when your senior programmer heads for the parking lot the moment things go wrong. Medical Records Management was Kaiser's most important system and one which should have had reliable support.

UPDATE #9:
"Tucson, Arizona Saturday, 28 December 2002
Data theft poses risk to 30,000 in S. Ariz.
By Carol Ann Alaimo
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
. . .TriWest Healthcare Alliance, a private firm that runs the Defense Department's TriCare HMO program for the military in 16 states, is in the process of notifying the tens of thousands of Arizonans whose confidential information was compromised during a Dec. 14 break-in
Thieves made off with computer equipment and data files that contained plan beneficiaries' names and addresses, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, medical claims histories and, in some cases, credit card information. . . . Close to half a million service people, dependents and retirees are affected across the firm's 16-state business area. . . . Those affected are enrollees in the TriCare Prime and TriCare Prime Remote managed care plans."
The full article is at http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/21228IDENTITYTHEFT2fjco-jmd.html

UPDATE #10:
Minnesota's Attorney General Raps Kaiser's New CEO, George Halvorson. Mr. Halvorson was CEO at HealthPartners in Minnesota prior to coming to Kaiser. The Attorney General cites inappropriate arrangements to pay a computer consultant, obfuscating payments to HMO officers, and allowing disclosure of private medical information of patients to third parties such as survey firms.

According to _The Pioneer_ newspaper, the Attorney General "cited irregularities in executive compensation, in the use of consultant contracts and in travel and entertainment." The newspaper editorialized on January 16th that, "In the case of HealthPartners, Minnesota's third-largest health plan, the times instead mean spending money like a drunken sailor on travel overseas, social club memberships, parties and no-holds-barred compensation plans." The full editorial is at http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfmBRD=2164&dept_id=401085&newsid=6714841&PAG=461&rfi=9
Also, see "HEALTH CARE: Hatch Issues Scathing HealthPartners Audit" in the __Grand Forks Herald__ online edition at http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/4957841.htm

UPDATE #11: Kaiser Permanente plans to spend $1.8 billion to automate its patient files. Kaiser will drop its decade long effort to develop such a system itself and instead will rely on systems from third parties. Kaiser HMO announced an initial purchase of software from Epic Systems. The selection was announced by George Halvorson, whose management of a Minnesota HMO was criticized last month by the Minnesota Attorney General for inappropriate payment arrangements for computer consultant services and for disclosing private patient information to third parties such as survey firms.

Kaiser may be inviting another major disaster. Kaiser's past efforts at buying and implementing major medical software packages from outside vendors have been troublesome. The public and press do not know about past failures because Kaiser does not let bad news travel outside of its computer center. For example, Kaiser purchased an automated clinical labs system in the 1980's. After making the purchase, Kaiser discovered that its clinical labs system would not communicate in real-time reliably with the main computer center. While Kaiser paid for a real-time system, it had to rely on couriers who carried tapes from the clinical labs site to the central data center. These trips were done only several times a day. ROUTINE CLINICAL LABS RESULTS WERE DELAYED HOURS EVERYDAY BECAUSE KAISER's COMPUTERS COULD NOT TALK TO ONE ANOTHER. WILL HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF with the Kaiser Permanente, Epic Systems electronic medical records software?

UPDATE #12: A Kaiser employee stole $500,000 using a computerized credit card processing terminal at a Kaiser facility. The employee pleaded guilty on February 4th. This news is at:
http://www.nbc4.com/news/1956584/detail.html

UPDATE #13: "Star Systems, which operates the largest network of bank ATM machines, just released a study claiming that 1 in 20 Americans say they have been the victim of identity theft during their lives. Barbara Span, the company?s vice president of external affairs, estimates that nearly 12 million Americans have been victims, losing a total of $23 billion. But in the year 2000, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the FBI reported only 922 identity theft arrests. That same year, federal prosecutors filed 2,172 cases." The entire article is on MSNBC at: http://www.msnbc.com/news/868706.asp?0cl=cR#BODY

UPDATE #14: March 18
Medications mix-up.
The wrong medications were sent to patients by Kaiser HMO on Thursday, March 13, 2003. The errors were caused by problems in its pharmacy computer systems.

Kaiser did not discover the error until the day after it occurred. Kaiser waited four days to go public with the news. Instead, Kaiser relied on making thousands of phone calls and sending courier-delivered letters to patients. After four days of phone calls and letters, Kaiser had still failed to reach 140 patients.

These errors could potentially have sent the wrong drugs to thousands of patients. The actual numbers are that three patients received the wrong drug and another three patients were given the wrong dose or the wrong instructions for the drug.

According to an early article published in the San Francisco Chronicle, "As many as 4,700 Kaiser patients received prescriptions that were possibly mislabeled after the HMO's Northern California pharmacy computer system suffered a power outage on Thursday." I remain skeptical of Kaiser's claims that it knows the extent of the problem, nor do I believe Kaiser behaved responsibly. These drug errors could have gone entirely undetected forever. Luck averted a tragedy caused by Kaiser's incompetence. See http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/03/18/BU256322.DTL

The Oakland Tribune published this account on March 18th: "Kaiser Permanente is recalling 6,805 prescriptions refilled in Northern California last Thursday because a computer glitch resulted in labeling errors. As of Monday evening Kaiser was still trying to reach at least 140 out of the 4,700 patients who picked up those refill prescriptions dated March 13, said Steve Gray, pharmacy professional affairs leader for Kaiser. About 9,000 prescriptions that had not yet been picked up by patients were recalled as well, according to the California Department of Managed Care.
So far, the wrong drug was found in three of the 6,805 prescriptions picked up by patients, Gray said. Kaiser found three errors among the 9,000 recalled from pharmacies -- one for the wrong dosage and two with the wrong instructions, according to the state.
No adverse patient reactions have been reported, Gray said. Potential errors range from a wrong prescription number to incorrect instructions or number of pills to receiving the wrong drug." The URL for this article is:
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1726~1252088,00.html

UPDATE #15: April 22, 2003.
"In the largest Medicaid fraud settlement, Bayer agreed yesterday to pay the government $257 million and pleaded guilty to a criminal charge after engaging in what federal prosecutors said was a scheme to overcharge for the antibiotic Cipro.
According to documents turned over to the government by a whistle-blower, Bayer was coached in the scheme by a purchasing manager from Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health care organizations.
The fraud involved selling Cipro to Kaiser at prices lower than the company was charging Medicaid, in violation of a federal law that requires drug makers to give the Medicaid program the lowest price charged to any customer. To cover up the fraud, the Cipro bottles sold to Kaiser were relabeled with Kaiser's name and given a different drug identification number.
In announcing the settlement yesterday, prosecutors in the United States attorney's office in Boston did not charge Kaiser with any wrongdoing. Prosecutors declined to comment on Kaiser yesterday and said the investigation was continuing." The original NY Times article of April 17, 2003 is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/business/17DRUG.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5062&en=e1b93a04618fc5a5&ex=1051156800&partner=GOOGLE

A free reprint of the NY Times article is at
http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20030417110326.asp

Also see
http://newsblaster.cs.columbia.edu/archives/2003-04-18-01-31-20/web/summaries/2003-04-18-01-33-28-040.html

UPDATE #16: May 6, 2003.
Kaiser orderly convicted of receiving 20,000 Ecstasy tablets.
"SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court upheld the Ecstasy drug conviction of a hospital orderly, rejecting claims Monday that the Drug Enforcement Administration violated his privacy.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a lower court and upheld the three-year prison term for Jesus Dario Gonzalez, a hospital orderly at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Bellflower.
Gonzalez challenged his conviction on grounds that the DEA needed a search warrant to install a secret surveillance camera in Kaiser's mailroom, where he was filmed picking up a package of 20,000 Ecstasy tablets that was sent to a fictitious doctor from Belgium.
The defendant claimed the DEA needed a search warrant, not just the hospital's consent, to install the video camera."
From the Fresno Bee of May 6, 2203 at http://www.fresnobee.com/local/story/6675063p-7615962c.html

UPDATE #17: May 19, 2003.
Kaiser HMO is "quietly outsourcing costly computer operations to companies in India. . . . Included in the information being made available to Indian techs-for-hire are:
-- Patients' medical data, including lab results and drugs being taken.
-- Members' personal information, including financial records and home addresses.
-- Payroll information for 135,000 Kaiser employees and 11,000 physicians, including salaries, benefits and Social Security numbers.
'It's a disaster waiting to happen,' said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a San Diego nonprofit. After all, who regulates these companies in India? People should be extremely wary of the possibility of fraud.' . . . Garry Hurlbut, Kaiser's vice president of information technology, stressed that the company's data will remain in Kaiser's own computers. But he acknowledged that nearly a half-dozen Indian outsourcing firms will have remote access." You can review the article, "Kaiser Exporting Privacy," by David Lazarus at
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/05/14/BU307139.DTL

On the bright side, Indian firms will have an opportunity to share their ideas on computer security with Kaiser. Perhaps they will have some good ideas about how to organize people's work around computers in such a way as to improve security. Looking at the statements made by Kaiser so far does not give much hope. Kaiser's official position denies its many failures: "Protecting our members' privacy is a primary mission for every Kaiser Permanente employee and physician, and we will not let that privacy be compromised in any way." Unfortunately, respect for privacy in Kaiser's computer systems is only a poorly served aspiration rather than a successful policy. The remarks by Bernard J. Tyson, Kaiser's Senior Vice President for Communications and External Relations are at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/18/BU277553.DTL&type=business

UPDATE #18: June 1, 2003.
Appointment information for patients has been left in my voice mailbox at my home on several occasions. This violates the privacy which Kaiser patients expect. Here is one such call received April 7th at 11:40 a.m.:
"Hi, Lena. This is Jenny calling from Kaiser from Dr. Hurr's office. (The name sounds like "Hurr.") I checked on the mammogram for you and the last mammogram was May 2000. So, she wanted to tell you to just call Radiology and have another one. And then after the age 40 you have it every year, so. You can call Radiology at 444-2966 to schedule that mammogram. All righty. Take care." An audio clip of this call is available near the bottom of this page.

October 24, 2003: A call at 9:50 a.m. from a non-Kaiser physician's office was left on my answering machine: "This message is for Jeb Trong. This is Rachel with Dr. Schwartz's office. I am calling to confirm your appointment for Monday at 4 o'clock with Dr. Schwartz." My caller-id display showed: "SCHWARTZ LEE K 415-921-7555." An audio clip of this call is included in the Audio Clips section near the bottom of this page. This doctor's office is located near the Mt. Zion campus of UCSF hospital which recently received this threat: "Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed . . . I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet." In light of its vulnerability, perhaps it would be appropriate for UCSF to review the calls made to me.

Posted November 10, 2003: The gas can pictured below was left at precisely the same location along my customary route where many, many dozens of red cups were left. (In total, hundreds of cups have been left at various locations. Almost always, the cups are left on the side of the street that I walk on and not on the other side of the street. At virtually all of these locations, there is no business nearby selling
the cups or dispensing drinks in such cups. At a major non-Kaiser hospital, a cup was left directly across the street from the hospital, at the bus stop I used while working at the hospital.) Like explosions at locations I frequent, the red cups have been the "calling cards" of the persons who have stalked me. Smoldering garbage has also been left. The Kaiser employee who claimed I was a spy for Kaiser management told me while I was working with her that Kaiser's computer systems smelled like "smoldering garbage."

A recent news account of a string of arson fires unrelated to me sheds light on the uses of "calling cards" left at the scene of crimes. Here is an excerpt from an Associated Press news article: "The crimes took place from New York to Texas, and fires were started with moviegoers in the theaters, requiring mass evacuations and causing some injuries, according a 14-count indictment unsealed by prosecutors. The multistate wave of arsons was aimed at pressuring theater chains into concessions on Chicago-area contracts, U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said. He said covers of compact discs made by the rock group Chicago were left behind at the scene of some out-of-town fires ‘just so the notion of the city of Chicago would be planted in the minds of the theater owners.'"

See: http://www.wcfcourier.com/articles/2003/11/08/news/breaking_news/3711af6885bba3fd86256dd8004c2390.txt

POSTED November 27, 2003: Another incident in the past few weeks along one of my regular walking routes. This one was a fire which appears to have gutted the upper floor of one building. The firefighting efforts were in progress as I walked by the building. This fire occurred just yards from red and green objects along one of my preferred walking routes.

I am not wedded to the notion that this HAD to be an arson fire, but think the possibility cries out to be investigated in light of the long history of explosions, etc. that I have recounted here.

POSTED WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3rd. Over the past years, I have received more than my share of inquiries from persons who self-describe as insurance company representatives requesting information about auto accidents. In every case, I was not present at the accidents and I had no knowledge of the people named by the insurance companies. Here is one example. My caller-id displayed "name unavailable" but showed the originating number as 916-285-3999. In her message on my answering machine, the caller identified herself as Gina Todd from USAA Insurance who was calling for Lena Nielson about an accident on East Blysdale Avenue in Mill Valley, California. The accident occurred the same day USAA Insurance called me and had been assigned the claim number 9740532, according to the representative. A return phone number was provided, 1-800-531-8222 x 46344. The caller said she wanted a statement of facts on the accident and that she would record the conversation. I received other similar calls about this same accident, some of which showed "314-588-5973" in the caller ID box. Usually, these types of calls stop within about one month of the initial call.

A week or so ago, I received a letter from another insurance company with the notation "URGENT REQUEST" addressed to yet another person I don't know. The letter was double-postmarked from Santa Clarita, CA and Woodland Hills, CA.

Interestingly, the call from USAA Insurance followed by one day another call from Dr. K. Schwartz Lee's office. (I've received several misdirected calls from that doctor's office. This specific call was from a woman on the doctor's staff who gave her name as Danielle.)

This website is owned by:

Jim Ristrem

jimristrem@earthlink.net


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