February 15, 2005
ChoicePoint:
Criminals posing as legitimate businesses have accessed critical personal data stored by ChoicePoint Inc., a firm that maintains databases of background information on virtually every U.S. citizen.
ChoicePoint warns more than 30,000 they may be at risk.
Oopsie!
Oh, and ChoicePoint was also the company that was paid $4 mil. in a no-bid contract from Florida's Katherine Harris to draw up felon rolls before the 2000 election. Discussed here.
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Oh, I'm sure that if they ask the criminals nicely, they wil do the same Choicepoint did after a previous scandal with a foreign government: they publicy destroyed the disks and CDs involved. No more problemo!
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That's freakin' scary, Flagpole. "Governments across Latin America have launched investigations after revelations that a US company is obtaining extensive personal data about millions of citizens in the region and selling it to the Bush administration."
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Weren't these guys involved in the questionable 'felons list' from the 2000 election?
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ChoicePoint was also the company that was paid $4 mil. in a no-bid contract from Florida's Katherine Harris to draw up felon rolls before the 2000 election.
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"Data thefts"? Didn't the "fake" firms pay for the data? And what's fake about them? You can easily register a DBA name, have a business, and not have any projects going. What if a felon is starting a real business? How can one prove malicious intent? There are a lot of holes here. Really it sounds like the company was just taking money and not dealing with the privacy issues until someone called them on it.
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Petebest, it is not scary: It is downright nightmarish. Those same countries are object of interest to the USA government, be it drugs or natural resources, and all of those countries have a dismal record of human rights violations and a history of political violence. The biggest fear was that, with these databases in the hands of a private company, malicious third parties could gain access to private records and persecute, kidnap, and torture individuals that opposed them. Identity theft is the least of your fears.
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I can't remember, as it's been over a year since I last worked a law reference desk, but this may have been the company of choice for finding those citizens to whom a subpeona was to be served.