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May 07, 2003

Ashcroft & ChoicePoint: Need I say more?

From the Guardian in the U.K. on Monday:

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.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (£6.86m) last year in return for its data, which includes Mexico's entire list of voters, including dates of birth and passport numbers, as well as Colombia's citizen identification database.

Literature that ChoicePoint produced to advertise its services to the department of justice promised, in the case of Colombia, a "national registry file of all adult Colombians, including date and place of birth, gender, parentage, physical description, marital status, passport number, and registered profession".

It is illegal under Colombian law for government agencies to disclose such information, except in response to a request for data on a named individual.

One lawyer following the investigations described Mexican officials as "incensed", and experts said the revelations threatened to destroy fragile public trust in the country's electoral institutions. In Nicaragua, police have raided two firms believed to have provided the data, and the Costa Rican government has also begun an inquiry. Other countries involved include Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina and Venezuela.

If you missed the Ashcroft connection, notice the key phrase: "literature that ChoicePoint produced to advertise its services to the department of justice."
As head of the Department of Justice, that would mean Ashcroft is responsible, if not directly involved. Still not convinced? Then of course, there is this. The Register in the UK claims to have a copy of the order from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Click here to see the documents, and decide for yourself. Several other sources, including the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Associated Press have reported on the Department of Justice contract with ChoicePoint. This from the AP:

The Justice Department’s $67 million four-year contract with ChoicePoint’s is the largest among federal agencies. But most of that is spent by agencies looking up U.S. records — like credit and crime histories — not data from foreign governments.

If you recall, Database Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint, was the firm hired by Jeb Bush for $4.3 million to purge unqualified voters from the voter lists in Florida before the 2000 election. Database Technologies created a revised list of 57,700 "possible felons" who were prevented from voting because they had a similar name and birthdate to a felon on the company's lists. After the fact, it turns out that thousands and thousands of these voters, disproportionately blacks, did in fact have the right to vote, and should not have been turned back at the polls. As Greg Palast and others have documented fairly well:

Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris’s elections office files, next to DBT’s sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: “DON’T NEED.”

Click here for a screen print from the Florida scrub list created by DBT. Click here for details on the five numbered voters, all of whom were purged illegally from the voter roles, on this single page of list. Of the "matches" on these lists, the civil-rights commission estimated that at least 14 percent - or 8,000 voters, nearly 15 times Bush's official margin of victory - were false.

In a happy coincidence for Choicepoint stockholders, the voters whom their proprietary software illegally barred from the polls were more than enough to give Bush a 537 vote margin of victory in Florida (hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and two page voting cards aside). I say this was a happy coincidence for Choicepoint stockholders because it meant that Bush won the election, and as you may have gathered by now, in the stuggle between citizens' rights to privacy and the interests of major corporations, Bush sides with the corporations every single time. He seems to honestly believe that letting corporations do anything they want is the key to a growing economy. Or maybe he really sees rising unemployment as a good thing. After all it keeps workers on their toes, and starves the labor movement.

The Guardian story goes on to explain:

Since the election, ChoicePoint has been the beneficiary of a huge increase in the freedom of government agencies to gain access to personal data. The USA patriot act, passed after September 11, allows government investigators to gain access to more information on US citizens without a search warrant, and to see data on private emails with such a warrant but without a wiretap order. The act also means banks must make their databases accessible to firms such as ChoicePoint.

In Mexico, the president of the federal electoral institute, Jose Woldenberg, revealed that his investigators had talked to the Mexican company that said it paid a "third person" 400,000 pesos (£24,500) for a hard disk full of personal data drawn largely from the electoral roll. It sold this to ChoicePoint for just $250,000, indicating the huge profitability of ChoicePoint's contracts - last year's $11m payment was part of a five-year contract worth $67m.

"The companies had to know that it is forbidden to use the information in the electoral register for any other purpose than elections," said Julio Tellez, a specialist in Mexico's information laws at the Tec de Monterrey University. "It is a federal crime to misuse the information, and they did that by selling it and putting it in the hands of a foreign government."

Mr Tellez said he believed that this makes the companies and the US government liable to prosecution.

Click here for a story on ChoicePoint's record profits the last two years.

I have a bad feeling that if Mexican American opinion begins to turn against Bush as Mexican opinion started to over the war, we may see ChoicePoint selling their newly acquired lists of Latin Americans to Republican governors nationwide, so that Mexican Americans with similar names and birth dates can be turned away from the polls as "suspected illegal immigrants." The very patronizingly named and ineffectively implemented Help America Vote Act is supposed to help preserve our right to vote, but will it? It forces the states to adopted statewide lists like the one used in Florida, adds strict new provisions to discourage voter fraud, and allows the states to hire firms like ChoicePoint to "scrub" their voter lists.

In all, this is a huge story, but I can only find references to it in a few online U.S. publications. Do the rest think the president of the federal electoral institute in Mexico is making this up? Do they think it isn't newsworthy? The San Fransisco Chronicle ran this brief story. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, ChoicePoint's hometown paper, ran an AP wire story on April 30th that mentions the controversy, but downplays it as "personal data that included even more private details than previously suspected." Still, the author does admit, "the electoral investigator acknowledged that the number of names in the ChoicePoint files coincided with those on Mexico's voter rolls -- about 65 million." Voter IDs are commonly used as a form of ID in Mexico, but in my view, that only makes it worse.

Regardless, the mainstream American media continue to ignore the story, as they largely ignored the Database Technologies story in the aftermath of 2000. The Balochistan Post in Pakistan does however have an interesting, original piece that makes several valid points despite it's exaggerated title: "Bush pays back to the firm that made him win in Florida." This whole thing is just so unbelieveable. Your U.S. Justice Department, Corrupting Democracies Around the Globe! I can't wait for the sequel in 2004, when Bush and Ashcroft are in charge of enforcing the Help America Vote Act. Things could get interesting.

I'll give the last word on this one to the AJC:

"The U.S. is to privacy what Caribbean islands are to money laundering," said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, deputy counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "If you want to store personal information in a jurisdiction where there are almost no legal protections, the U.S. is the place to do it."

Besides contracts with the U.S. government, including a five-year, $67 million deal with the Department of Justice, ChoicePoint sells information about consumers to 60 percent of the Fortune 500.

Posted by Mike at May 7, 2003 07:56 PM

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