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Articles : Civil LibertiesThe Spies Who Shag Us
I know you’re shocked – SHOCKED! – that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That’s nothing. And it’s not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration’s Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI – though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called “data mining,” is a company, formed in 1997, called, “ChoicePoint, Inc,” which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain’t nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans — and I know they’ve expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you – because the FBI can’t. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you’re suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for “commercial” purchases – and under the Bush Administration’s suspect reading of the Patriot Act – our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint’s board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone – even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 “felons” that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida’s voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they’ve since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint’s ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, “hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]” from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds — but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was “the number one” provider of DNA info to the FBI.
“And that scares the hell out of me,” said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It’s more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida “felons,” Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test “results” on rape case evidence … that didn’t exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.
But it won’t stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about “surveillance” of innocent Americans. That’s because FEAR is a lucrative business – not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin – each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).
But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex — and they want you to be afraid. Back to today’s New York Times, page 28: ““Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/science/12dna.html.” And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.
“Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family,” says the Times – which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.
It doesn’t end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won’t stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone’s going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.
The knuckleheads at the Times don’t put the three stories together because the real players aren’t in the press releases their reporters re-write.
But that’s the Fear Industry for you. You aren’t safer from terrorists or criminals or “felon” voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.
And that’s their program. They get the data mine – and we get the shaft.
GNN contributor Greg Palast is author of “Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ’08, No Child’s Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War,” out June 6. You can order it now here.
For more horror and humor from the War on Terror, listen to an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Armed Madhouse, “Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?
Posted by anthony
Anthony Lappé is GNN's Executive Editor. He's written for The New York Times, Details, New York, Paper, The Fader and Vice, among many others. He has worked as a producer for MTV and Fuse. He is the co-author of GNN's True Lies and the producer of their Iraq doc,...
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Posted by anthony on Thursday, October 14th 2004 - Poll: Most Americans Support NSA's Efforts
Posted by paz_y_justicia on Friday, May 12th 2006 - What's new about government eavesdropping?
Posted by Szamko on Friday, May 12th 2006
It is good to see Palast on here..thanks Anthony.
Perhaps data retention/data mining could be a focus of an ‘investigation’ once you guys roll that functionality out here on GNN...
Link this to sam’s article on SOCOM and you’ve got a recipe for dissaster
what exactly do you mean, a recipe for disaster?
meaning that this combined with SOCOM are the ingredients required for a dish called democratic deficit or maybe even dictatorship
I couldn’t agree more…they need the control to sustain their unprecedented profits into the foreseeable future.
I think I just pooed ‘my pants. This seems so out of a bad 80’s sci-fi movie…although I’m not really surprised by any of this. And that’s even more scary!
For a moment ponder this idea. It is now the law that all cellphones must have GPS. Not only will big brother have your phone calls but they will be able to track you everywhere you go, even it you get no cell service the GPS will still work. Even when the phone is off the GPS is still on. The only way to turn off the GPS is to pull the battery. Not to mention that most new cellphones have speakerphone and a camera that can be used to listen and watch you. Most every american now carries a detail leach; they just don’t know it.
BIG BROTHER INC. TRIES TO FOOL RANDI RHODES — AND THAT’S NOT NICE
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
by Greg Palast
I smell mendacity! The sticky-sweet Atlanta drawl of the PR flack for America’s private KGB was dancing in rhetorical circles with Randi Rhodes, Air American, on her broadcast yesterday. Unfortunately for the Bush-friendly Spies-R-Us contractor, Randi also has a keen nose for the telltale scent of pure bullshit.
By “private KGB,” I mean ChoicePoint, Inc., the Atlanta company that keeps over 16 billion records on Americans which it sells to the FBI, Homeland Security and, through a bit of a slip-up, identity thieves.
They are watching you because George and Dick don’t have time to track everyone in America (and that would be illegal, to boot), ChoicePoint does it. Then turns over the electronic you — cross-matched profiles of voting registration, your DNA info and who knows what else — for a price.
Randi was on the phone to one James Lee, Marketing Director of ChoicePoint. He was trying to explain some of the good work they do for government — and responding to the evil lies about his corporation by a reporter (me).
I was listening in from a glass booth. The Eichmann treatment was required by ChoicePoint — they wouldn’t let her interview the company if anyone else was in the room. They also warned her, her interview would be “taped” ... AND, they didn’t have to add, they know where she lives — and where she votes and a whole lot more about Randi that maybe Randi herself doesn’t know. Just a friendly warning.
It seems the data guys were upset that she had me on her show on Monday to talk about my investigations of the company which I conducted for BBC-TV, for Harper’s and for my new book, Armed Madhouse. [ Yeah, that’s a plug: order it at www.GregPalast.com ]
The company’s name came up because of the Bush regime’s getting caught with their hands in the data jar: spying on Americans, sucking our phone records into data bases where George and Dick can peruse them at leisure, without warrants.
ChoicePoint’s the big banana in the data game, with fat no-bid contracts with Big Brother Bush’s agency and the Department of Fatherland Security. (Homeland? Deutschland? Whatever.) Other governments, including Mexico, threatened ChoicePoint operatives with arrest for their use and misuse of data, but Dick and George like’m just fine. That’s because ChoicePoint provides just the data that suits their needs — not necessarily accurate, but accurate is not what is needed.
For example, ChoicePoint is the company that gave Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush the list of Florida voters, most of them Black, which were removed as “felons” before the 2000 election. The list was ridiculously inaccurate — these were innocent citizens — but those African-Americans lost their voting rights anyway and Jeb’s brother thereby took the White House.
That’s not nice, what Jeb and Katherine did — but ChoicePoint kept silent. In return, they received a high, and highly suspect, fee for their “work.”
And that’s dangerous. Because, after ChoicePoint selected our president for us, our president selected them for no-bid jobs to save us from terrorists — which they do by keeping track of us. (Odd, I thought Americans were the VICTIMS of terror — they’ve made us the SUSPECTS.)
In Armed Madhouse, I reveal that one ChoicePoint executive confidentially told me the company’s chairman hoped to build a national DNA database. Dracula’s got nothing on these guys: they are already the biggest providers of DNA info to the FBI, they boast. They boast about it one week — then they deny it another. This week’s flavor is denial.
Back to Randi. I wasn’t allowed in the room with her, so I waited in the glass booth. ChoicePoint had a huge list of complaints about my latest comment on their activities. I thought it important for the public to know how these private “data mining” companies drill into you and sell up the valuable nuggets they find to Mr. Bush’s spy apparatus.
As a public service — everyone needs a laugh once in a while — I’m reprinting their inventive rebuttal to my report, “The Spies Who Shag Us” (for Buzzflash, May 12).
The company uses some clever rhetorical sleights of hand: “No data files or ‘dossiers’ exist at ChoicePoint.” Now that’s just darn strange for a data company.
But that’s a quibble. Let’s move to the out and out flaming fabrications, whoppers and what, before George Bush took office, we used to call “stinking, bald-faced lies.” (Now we call it, “intelligence.”)
ChoicePoint swore to Ms. Rhodes that they do not have or sell “credit” information. Yet, according to the company’s own filing, among their other Big Brother products, they sell:
“...claims history data, motor vehicle records, police records, CREDIT INFORMATION and modeling services…employment background screenings and drug testing administration services, public record searches, vital record services, credential verification, due diligence information, DNA identification services, authentication services and people and shareholder locator information searches…print fulfillment, teleservices, database and campaign management services…”Uh, oh. They are either fibbing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (their CEO is already under investigation by the SEC) — or they are prevaricating to Randi. They shouldn’t do that, because, the lady has class — she let ChoicePoint give their goofy alibi uninterrupted; but, lie to her, and, as my editor says, “she’ll bite off a chicken’s head while it’s laying eggs.”
So who are you toying with, Mr. ChoicePoint, the SEC or Randi?
There’s more. ChoicePoint’s PR apologist says it doesn’t maintain credit card records, but they fail to mention that they sell “credit report headers” — which is why the federal government just fined them a record $10 million for letting identity thieves run off with this kind of info. They sell “SSN verification” (your social security number), financial reports, education verification, reference verification, felony checks, motor vehicle records, asset location and information on criminal suspects and their neighbors and relatives. Howdy, neighbor!
Let’s go back to ChoicePoint’s dirty work for the Brothers Bush. ChoicePoint writes that it didn’t get its corporate hands dirty in the racist purge of voters which fixed the 2000 election. That was the fault of some company called “DBT” which ChoicePoint only purchased, they claim, “after DBT’s work was done for the state.”
Au contraire. ChoicePoint bought DBT before the election, while the purges were in full swing. Then, right after the “election,” ChoicePoint’s PR mouthpieces boasted about how the company was going to cash in on its “success” (their word) in purging Florida voter rolls. Their PR flack told me at the time, “Given the outcome of our work in Florida, and with a new president in place (!), we think our services will expand across the country.” But then we caught them — and they quit elections games and moved on to saving us from Al Qaeda. Lord help us.
Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about ChoicePoint. They’re in it for the money. If they turned a blind eye to evil, if they abetted the theft of an election and kept silent to keep the money, well, that’s the Fear Industry for you.
It’s not what ChoicePoint sells that terrifies me, it’s whom they’re selling it to: a regime for whom information is a weapon and disinformation a way of life.