Dirty Dealings in Data

Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Dirty Dealings in Data

Last month, Forbes reported on "a few winners" already emerging from the war on terror. "High up on the list of businesses that will benefit...ChoicePoint Inc."

It probably doesn't ring a bell, but ChoicePoint was the firm that Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State during the 2000 elections, paid to erase 57,000 names from the voter rolls.

Supposedly, these were convicted felons forbidden to vote in Florida, but 90% of them turned out to be innocent of any crime--except perhaps Voting While Black. Over half the innocent voters on the list were black, and had they been allowed to exercise their voting rights, Gore would have whipped Bush in Florida.

This was first unearthed by BBC television journalist Greg Palast, and it's in the new U.S. edition of his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now out from Plume.

ChoicePoint, Palast reports, is a database company with prominent Republicans on its board and payroll, and it now offers up over 20 billion pieces of information on American citizens to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Since passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the feds can access all that formerly private info without a search warrant.

The PATRIOT Act also requires banks to make their databases accessible to info-operators such as ChoicePoint, so a company called Sybase has started selling a "PATRIOT-compliant" software patch. The lucky big investor in Sybase? Winston Partners, founded by presidential brother Marvin Bush.

Even though Congress voted to kill the Orwellian Total Information Awareness project (see The Lowdown, Jan. 2002), snoop-in-chief John Poindexter is still issuing lucrative contracts for spying on you and me. To "mine" our citizen profiles for useful info, Poindexter chose Syntek, where he himself worked as a senior VP before Bush tapped him to run TIA.

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