Bush: Poindexter, Choice Point, Hank Asher

[Moses]

From: Project for The Old American Century

John Poindexter and Hank Asher: Former business
partners or just so much in common?

Specializing in covert domestic spying programs and cocaine trafficking.

Poindexter orchestrated the domestic spying program (operation Phoenix) in Indo-China where kidnap and assassination were the rule of the day. Poindexter was up to his epiglottis in the cocaine side of the Iran Contra scandal and received five felonies as a result. Poindy escaped prosecution on technicalities thanks to Bush senior. Years later Poindexter is appointed by Bush Jr to create the Total Information Awareness Office. Shortly thereafter Poindexter steps down under public scrutiny and congress refuses to fund the TIA office that he created due to its unconstitutionality.

Hank Asher then creates the MATRIX as a state level network version of the TIA office. Essentially continuing the TIA office, but freeing it from congressional oversight and federal whistleblower protections. He admits smuggling millions
of dollars worth of cocaine in 1981 and 1982. Coincidentally at the time when the Iran-Contra dealings were in full swing.

But this is only speculation. Could there be more of a link between illegal dealings between Hank Asher and the republican party? OF COURSE THERE IS!

In1992, Asher founded Database Technologies, which later merged with ChoicePoint. In 1999, he founded Seisint Inc. by merging two companies. He is still on Seisint's board of directors, and continues to play an active role in the company. During the 2000 presidential election ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors.

So there we have it. We went from having a domestic spying agency run by a five time felon to having the same domestic spying program sans congressional oversight and whistle blower protections run by a convicted drug smuggler who has proven  that he'll break the law to further the republican agenda.

[Moses]

www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=4&row=1
observer.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4103063,00.html

Inside Republican America
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A blacklist burning for Bush
The more you look the more disbarred and 'disappeared' Gore voters you find. You'd almost think it was deliberate

Gregory Palast
Sunday December 10, 2000
The Observer

Hey, Al, take a look at this. Every time I cut open another alligator, I find the bones of more Gore voters. This week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland known as the Office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of voters electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. About half of those named are African-Americans. They had the right to vote, but they never made it to the balloting booths.

When we left off our Florida story two weeks ago, The Observer discovered that Harris's office had ordered the elimination of 8,000 Florida voters on the grounds that they had committed felonies in other states. None had. Harris bought the bum list from a company called ChoicePoint, a firm whose Atlanta executive suite and boardroom are filled with Republican funders. ChoicePoint, we have learned, picked up the list of faux felons from state officials in - ahem - Texas. In fact, it was a roster of people who, like their Governor, George W, had committed nothing more than misdemeanours.

For Harris, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and his brother, the Texas blacklist was a mistake made in Heaven. Most of those targeted to have their names 'scrubbed' from the voter roles were African-Americans, Hispanics and poor white folk, likely voters for Vice-President Gore. We don't know how many voters lost their citizenship rights before the error was discovered by a few sceptical county officials, before ChoicePoint, which has gamely 'fessed-up to the Texas-sized error, produced a new list of 58,000 felons. In May, Harris sent on the new, improved scrub sheets to the county election boards. Maybe it's my bad attitude, but I thought it worthwhile to check out the new list. Sleuthing around county offices with a team of researchers from internet newspaper Salon.com, we discovered that the 'correct' list wasn't so correct.

One elections supervisor, Linda Howell of Madison County, was so upset by the errors that she refused to use the Harris/ChoicePoint list. How could she be so sure the new list identified innocent people as felons? Because her own name was on it, 'and I assure you, I am not a felon'.

Our 10-county review suggests a minimum 15 per cent misidentification rate. That makes another 7,000 innocent people accused of crimes and stripped of their citizenship rights in the run-up to the presidential race. And not just any 7,000 people. Hillsborough (Tampa) county statisticians found that 54 per cent of the names on the scrub list belonged to African-Americans, who voted 93 per cent for Gore.

Now our team, diving deeper into the swamps, has discovered yet a third group whose voting rights were stripped. The ChoicePoint-generated list includes 1,704 names of people who, earlier in their lives, were convicted of felonies in Illinois and Ohio. Like most American states, these two restore citizenship rights to people who have served their time in prison and then remained on the good side of the law.

Florida strips those convicted in its own courts of voting rights for life. But Harris's office concedes, and county officials concur, that the state of Florida has no right to impose this penalty on people who have moved in from these other states. (Only 13 states, most in the Old Confederacy, bar reformed criminals from voting.)

Going deeper into the Harris lists, we find hundreds more convicts from the 35 other states which restored their rights at the end of sentences served. If they have the right to vote, why were these citizens barred from the polls? Harris didn't return my calls. But Alan Dershowitz did. The Harvard law professor, a renowned authority on legal process, said: 'What's emerging is a pattern of reducing the total number of voters in Florida, which they know will reduce the Democratic vote.'

How could Florida's Republican rulers know how these people would vote? I put the question to David Bositis, America's top expert on voting demographics. Once he stopped laughing, he said the way Florida used the lists from a private firm was, 'an obvious technique to discriminate against black voters'. In a darker mood, Bositis, of Washington's Center for Political and Economic Studies, said the sad truth of American justice is that 46 per cent of those convicted of felony are African-American. In Florida, a record number of black folk, over 80 per cent of those registered to vote, packed the polling booths on November 7. Behind the curtains, nine out of 10 black people voted Gore.

Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project, Washington, pointed out that the 'white' half of the purge list would be peopled overwhelmingly by the poor, also solid Democratic voters.

Add it up. The dead-wrong Texas list, the uncorrected 'corrected' list, plus the out-of-state ex-con list. By golly, it's enough to swing a presidential election. I bet the busy Harris, simultaneously in charge of both Florida's voter rolls and George Bush's presidential campaign, never thought of that.

But enough is never enough, it seems. We have discovered a fourth group of Gore voters also barred from the polls.

It was Thursday, 2am. On the other end of the line, heavy breathing, then a torrent too fast for me to catch it all. 'Vile... lying... inaccurate... pack of nonsense... riddled with errors'... click! This was not a ChoicePoint whistleblower telling me about the company's notorious list. It was ChoicePoint's own media communications representative, Marty f*gan, communicating with me about my, 'sleazy disgusting journalism' in reporting on it.

I was curious about this company that appears - although never say never in this game - to have chosen the next President for America's voters. Its board dazzles with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone and Home Depot tycoon Bernard Marcus, big Republican funders.

Florida is the only state to hire an outside firm to suggest who should lose citizenship rights. That may change. 'Given a new President, and what we accomplished in Florida, we expect to roll across the nation,' ChoicePoint told me ominously.

They have quite a pedigree for this solemn task. The company's Florida subsidiary, Database Technologies (now DBT Online), was founded by one Hank Asher. When US law enforcement agencies alleged that he may have been associated with Bahamian drug dealers - although no charges were brought - the company lost its data management contract with the FBI. Hank and his friends left last year and so, in Florida's eyes, the past is forgiven.

Thursday, 3am. (I should say both calls were at my request). A new, gentler voice giving me ChoicePoint's upbeat spin. 'You say we got over 15 per cent wrong - we like to look at that as up to 85 per cent right!' That's 7,000 votes-plus - the bulk Democrats, not to mention the thousands on the Texas list. Gore may lose by 500 votes.

I contacted San Francisco-based expert Mark Swedlund. 'It's just fundamental industry practice that you don't roll out the list statewide until you have tested it and tested it again,' he said. 'Dershowitz is right: they had to know that this jeopardised thousands of people's registrations. And they would also know the [racial] profile of those voters.'

'They' is Florida state, not ChoicePoint. Let's not get confused where the blame lies. Harris's crew lit this database fuse, then acted surprised when it blew up. Swedlund says ChoicePoint had a professional responsibility to tell the state to test the list; ChoicePoint says the state should not have used its 'raw' data.

Until Florida privatised its Big Brother powers, laws kept the process out in the open. This year, when one county asked to see ChoicePoint's formulas and back-up for blacklisting voters, they refused - these were commercial secrets. So we'll never know how America's president was chosen.

ChoicePoint complains that I said Harris signed their contract. It was a Beth Emory. I'm still more than 85 per cent accurate.


[e-mail]

[Moses]

Disinfopedia:

Hank Asher

According to the August 3, 2003, AP article "State [of Florida] contracts with company founded by man linked to smuggling," Hank Asher was "implicated two decades ago in a Bahamian drug smuggling ring." Asher was "hired by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to help create a 13-state anti-terrorism network (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange Program) being launched with $4 million in Justice Department funding."

"Millionaire Hank Asher of Boca Raton, a friend of recently retired FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) director James 'Tim' Moore and a major political contributor, was never charged with drug smuggling. He served as an informant and witness in several trials, and was identified by other FDLE (Florida Department of Law Enforcement) informants as someone who provided police protection for smuggling operations."

"Asher's first company, DBT Online, Inc., bought him out for $147 million in 1999 after the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration suspended its contracts over Asher's past and concerns that the company could potentially monitor targets of investigations.

"Asher has not charged FDLE for many of his services, McLaughlin said.Seisint, Inc. technology has been demonstrated for Vice President thingy Cheney and Gov. Jeb Bush.

"Documents filed by prosecutors in Chicago identified Asher as a pilot and former smuggler who lived in the Bahamas near a small airport once used by smugglers."


One day earlier, on August 2, 2003, the St. Petersburg Times reported that
"In an attempt to identify potential terrorists, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is using the services of a former drug smuggler turned millionaire.

"Hank Asher, 48, a computer technology expert who lives in a $3-million Boca Raton house, has founded several companies that retrieve huge amounts of electronic information about individuals."

"FDLE files say informants identified Asher as a person who provided police protection for smuggling operations in the Bahamas. Asher was listed as a witness in drug trials from Gainesville to Chicago, and once was represented by famed attorney F. Lee Bailey. Documents filed by prosecutors in Chicago said Asher was a pilot and former smuggler who lived on Great Harbour near Cistern Cay, a small island airport once used by smugglers.

"After severing ties with DBT Online, Asher created other companies and grew even closer to law enforcement officials. In 1999, he merged two companies into Seisint Inc. The new company supplies Accurint, a database that provides detailed information on individuals. Seisint also supplies specialized information to law enforcement agencies around the country.

"FDLE began doing business with Asher's first company in 1993. It is clear from 1993 records that FDLE officials knew they were dealing with a drug smuggler. Some officers questioned whether Asher's company could be trusted. No additional background check was conducted in 2001, when the relationship grew closer."

---

Other Related Disinfopedia Resources
External Links :

• Florida hires firm founded by man implicated in drug-smuggling to fight terror, CNews.canoe.ca: "Hank Asher is founder of Seisint, Inc., an information-technology company with a $1.6-million contract with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to work on a pilot program for the Matrix network, through which sensitive information on terrorism and other crime suspects would be exchanged."
  
• State contracts with company founded by man linked to smuggling (cache file), AP, August 3, 2003.
  
• Florida Creates 'the Matrix', a Big Brother-Like Surveillance System with Help From Choicepoint-Related Firm, Democracy Now, August 7, 2003. Includes considerable discussion about Asher.
  
• Lucy Morgan, Troubled Business May Lose Contract with State. St. Petersburg Times, August 13, 2003.
  
• Man Implicated As Ex-Smuggler Quits Job, AP, August 29, 2003.
  
• Jim Krane, U.S. funding privately run database intended for tracking terrorists, AP, September 24, 2003: "Dubbed Matrix, the database has been in use for a year and a half in Florida, where police praise the crime-fighting tool as nimble and exhaustive. It cross-references the state's driving records and restricted police files with billions of pieces of public and private data, including credit and property records. ... Matrix houses restricted police and government files on colossal databases that sit in the offices of Seisint Inc., a Boca Raton, Fla., company founded by a millionaire whom police say flew planeloads of drugs into the country in the early 1980s."
  
• Thomas C. Greene,A back door to Poindexter's Orwellian dream, TheRegister, September 24, 2003: "The company profiting from this data bonanza, Florida outfit Seisint Inc., is run by a gentleman implicated two decades ago in a drug smuggling ring, according to the Associated Press. This certainly qualifies him as an appropriate understudy to Poindexter."
  

[Moses]

ChoicePoint
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

ChoicePoint (NYSE: CPS) is a corporation based near Atlanta, Georgia, USA, which claims to be the "nation's leading supplier of identification and credential verification services."


Overview:

ChoicePoint has a DNA laboratory which was used to identify victims of the WTC attacks. Data supplied by ChoicePoint was used in the Beltway Snipers investigation. Choicepoint also assisted the Transportation Security Administration in conduction ~100,000 applicants. The US Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children credit the corporation with assisting in the return of ~800 missing children. As of 2003, ChoicePoint's CEO is Derek V. Smith, who has held that position since 1997. In 2002, ChoicePoint generated earnings of ~$200 million on revenue of ~$791 million. The company employs ~3,500 people at 52 locations within 26 states.


Florida Voter File Contract:

In 1998, the state of Florida signed a $4 million contract with Database Technologies (DBT Online), which later merged into ChoicePoint, for the purposes of providing a central voter file listing those barred from voting. As of 2002, Florida is the only state which hires a private firm for these purposes. Prior to contracting with Database Technologies, Florida contracted with a smaller operatore for $5,700 per year. The state Florida contracted with DBT in November 1998, following the controversial Miami mayoral race of 1997. The 1998 contracting process involved no bidding and was worth $2,317,800.


Criticism Regarding the Florida Voter File:

ChoicePoint has been criticized, by many critics of the 2000 election, for having a bias in favor of the Republican Party, for knowingly using inaccurate data, and for racial discrimination. Allegations include listing voters as felons for alleged crimes said to have been committed several years in the future. In addition, people who had been convicted of a felony in a different state and had their rights restored by said state, were not allowed to vote despite the restoration of their rights. (One should note Schlenther v. Florida Department of State (June 1998) which ruled that Florida could not prevent a man convicted of a felony in Connecticut, where his civil rights had not been lost, from exercising his civil rights.) Furthermore, it is argued that people were listed as felons based on a coincidence of names, despite other data (such as date of birth) which showed that the criminal record did not apply to the voter in question.

Journalist Greg Palast has argued that the firm cooperated with Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Florida Elections Unit Chief Clay Roberts, in a conspiracy of voter fraud, involving the central voter file, during the US Presidential Election of 2000. The allegations charge that 57,700 people (15% of the list), primarily Democrats of African-American and Hispanic descent, were incorrectly listed as felons and thus barred from voting. Palast estimates that 80% of these people would have voted, and that 90% of those who would have voted, would have voted for Al Gore. The official (and disputed) margin of victory, in the election, was 537 votes.

ChoicePoint Vice President Martin f*gan has admitted that at least 8,000 names were incorrectly listed in this fashion when the company passed on a list given by the state of Texas, these 8,000 names were removed prior to the election. f*gan has described the error as a "minor glitch". ChoicePoint, as a matter of policy, does not verify the accuracy of its data and argues that it is the user's responsibility to verify accuracy.

On April 17, 2000, at a special Congressional hearing in Atlanta, ChoicePoint Vice-President James Lee testified that Florida had ordered DBT to add to the list voters who matched 80% of an ineligible voter's name; middle initials and suffixes were to be dropped, while nicknames and aliases were added. In addition, names were considered reversible, for example; Clarence Thomas could be added in place of Thomas Clarence. Lee opened his testimony by noting that ChoicePoint intended to get out of the voter purge industry. Then, on February 16, 2001, DBT Senior Vice-President George Bruder testified before the US Civil Rights Commission that the company had misinformed the Florida Supervisors of Elections regarding the usage of race in compiling the list. Greg Palast concludes, "An African-American felon named John Doe might wipe out the registration of an innocent African-American Will Whiting, but not the rights of an innocent Caucasian Will Whiting." Palast believes that 80%, of the 57,700 people he argues were illegally barred from voting, were African-American.

In January 2000, Pennsylvania terminated its contract with ChoicePoint after alleging that the firm had illegally sold citizens' personal information.


DBT Online:

DBT Online was founded by Hank Asher as Database Technologies. The group once had a data management contract with the FBI, however, this was terminated following allegations that Asher was associated with Bahamian drug dealers. (1 p.18)


Quotes

* Vice-President Martin L. f*gan

"Given the outcome of our work in Florida and with a new president in place, we think our services will expand across the country."



External Links

* ChoicePoint.Com (Official)
* DBTOnline.Com (Official)


See Also:

* Diebold


References

* 1 -- The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast 2002

[Moses]

Troubled business may lose contract with state


Amid concerns about the company founder, the state will consider bids from competitors.

By LUCY MORGAN, Times Tallahassee Bureau Chief
St. Petersburg Times
published August 13, 2003
------------------------------------------------------------------------


TALLAHASSEE - A South Florida technology company founded by a former drug smuggler no longer has a lock on a $1.6-million contract to develop an antiterrorism network.

Three other technology companies want the business and have submitted proposals to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

On Aug. 1 FDLE indicated it was entering into a $1.6-million no-bid deal with Seisint Inc., a Boca Raton company that has been given access to the state law enforcement agency to develop Matrix, a multistate network. Additional federal money is expected to take the cost of the system to more than $8-million.

New proposals have come from Knowledge Computing Corp., Tucson, Ariz., EWA Government Services Inc., Chantilly, Va.; and Logic Pros, LLC, Sarasota. Two of the companies have extensive contracts with other government agencies.

Meanwhile, officials at FDLE are investigating the background of Hank Asher, founder of Seisint and other technology companies. Asher was identified as a pilot and former smuggler in several drug smuggling cases prosecuted in the mid-1980s.

In one federal case brought against 17 men in Florida, court records filed in 1987 list Asher as an unindicted co-conspirator in a group responsible for bringing more than $150-million worth of cocaine into Florida in a single year. Asher was never charged with drug smuggling but became an informant for state and federal authorities.

Labeled a technology genius by his friends and business associates, Asher, now a wealthy Boca Raton businessman, established a close friendship with former FDLE director James T. "Tim" Moore, who retired at the end of July to enter private business.

Asher was the only non-law enforcement official on the agenda for Moore's retirement party last month. The event included a presentation of a framed picture of Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp with pictures of Asher and Moore substituted for the heads of Masterson and Earp.

That appearance sparked a series of letters to Gov. Jeb Bush from FDLE agents who complained about the Asher-Moore relationship.

Daryl McLaughlin, interim director at FDLE, ordered the expansive background check. The agency did a less extensive review of Asher's background in 1993 when it began doing business with one of his companies. But it did not do the same sort of background check it usually does before entering into the new agreement.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Asher approached FDLE officials to offer help identifying terrorists. He has been working with the agency since then to develop the new system, which will give law enforcement agencies speedy access to millions of records on individuals.

Critics say the system would allow too much personal information, including things like credit reports, to get into the hands of law enforcement agencies. FDLE officials say the system gives them unparalleled access to information that could lead to the arrest of terrorists.

Asher's drug smuggling past surfaced in 1998 when DBT Online Inc., a publicly traded company that Asher founded as Data Base Technologies in 1992, forced him to sell his shares in the company. The action came after officials at the FBI and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration canceled contracts with DBT citing Asher's prior involvement in drug smuggling.

A lawsuit pending in Palm Beach County Circuit Court accuses Asher and his new company, Seisint, of illegally taking his former company's technology to create a competing product.

Asher also violated a clause in agreements he signed pledging to keep the company's technology confidential, the suit filed by Choicepoint Inc. alleges.

Seisint's product, Accurint, has features similar to Auto Track, which has been produced by DBT, a company which now operates as Choicepoint, the suit alleges.

Choicepoint contends Asher and Seisint are using confidential business information they developed and costing Choicepoint sales and profits. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and attorney's fees.

[Moses]

-Posted on Mon, Mar. 22, 2004

Firms Feed on Personal Information Left by Computer Users

By Duane D. Stanford, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

Mar. 21 -(Excerpt)

Hundreds of companies are selling and swapping information --- everything from your phone number to what you buy at the supermarket --- and storing it in databases to be cross-referenced again and again.

A guy in Texas sifts through your likes and dislikes to sell face-lifts. A South Dakota entrepreneur scours the Web for your secrets and sells them to your neighbor. Dozens of men and women in courthouses across metro Atlanta feed the details of your life into electronic files.... But even those who believe this data should be accessible agree its aggregation is cause for concern.....--- they are creating bigger, faster, more precise databases about you. Equally troubling, privacy experts agree, is people's ignorance of who is collecting their data and where the information is stored.....

To understand the data mining business, it's helpful to understand who's working to acquire your information and what they do with it. Here's a glimpse of four such players.

....plastic surgeon turned [patients] into demographics: name, address, telephone number.Then he handed over the information to Stephen Beer of Texas for a statistical makeover, asking Beer to turn up more patients just like them.
Beer sent the customer list to a data compiler, which tacked on all kinds of information about the patients: vacation homes, magazine preferences, hobbies, travel patterns, salary ranges, ages, jobs, car registrations, even their credit cards --- premium or regular. Beer culled a dozen or so characteristics that set the patients apart from a sample group....Beer asked the data compiler for a list of everyone within 20 miles of the surgeon's office who fit that profile......

---

Pam Mosley.... spends much of her day standing in courthouse deed rooms, keying details of property records into a laptop computer..... On an average day, Mosley collects and stores details from as many as 200 homes. The information is all public --- names of homeowners and closing attorneys, sales prices, legal descriptions. Every day, an army of paid workers like Mosley fan out to the courthouses of America. While more courthouse clerks are putting data online directly, much still has to be hand-collected. Mosley is one of a dozen data collectors who divide their time among 20 metro Atlanta counties for the Norcross-based Market Data Center. They download their work to the company's computer servers.....

---

If Mosley is at one end of the lucrative information food chain, Alpharetta-based ChoicePoint is at the other.

The company gets 40,000 new public records each day from courthouses and government agencies nationwide, said James Lee, its chief marketing officer. That information stream feeds a database of more than 19 billion records used to complete 6 million background checks a year.

"We help governments, businesses --- whatever --- know if a person is who they claim to be," Lee said.

ChoicePoint collects and manages confidential credit and driver information used by insurance companies to set rates. It provides criminal and personal background searches to federal, state and local governments for everything from homeland security checks to hit-and-run investigations. It screens potential employees for businesses. It provides background searches to private investigators. And it compiles data for permission-based marketing.

ChoicePoint is one of several major players in a $2 billion-a-year industry that has grown by nearly 10 percent annually during the past decade, according to financial analysts at Lehman Brothers.

ChoicePoint spun off seven years ago from Atlanta-based Equifax, one of the leading U.S. credit rating agencies. ChoicePoint since has bought more than 40 smaller companies and competitors that specialize in everything from birth and death records to DNA testing. The company developed a proprietary criminal database, the National Criminal File, which it believes is larger than the FBI's.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act prohibits ChoicePoint and companies like it from using credit records when compiling background searches. ChoicePoint does not sell background checks to individuals without permission from the subject, Lee said.

Still, privacy advocates target the company because it provides background information to at least 30 federal agencies. And with such a massive cache of personal data under one roof, the information could leach into the mainstream, they say.

Timothy Mohr is senior manager of fraud and recovery at BDO Seidman, the fifth-largest accounting firm in the country. A licensed private investigator, Mohr said services like ChoicePoint make his job "a lot easier." But he acknowledges there's a catch.

"When you make it easier for those who are doing it for legitimate reasons, you make it easier for those who are doing it for not-legit reasons," he said.

Mohr said when he was in private practice, it wasn't unusual for a potential client to ask whether he was "aboveboard or below board," hoping he would be willing to provide them with information average citizens can't get.

Beer, the data purchaser, said he has no doubt marketing data escape from the back doors of companies, although he doubts they would never admit it. It's especially likely now that data fit easily onto a compact disk.

"You can put it in your shirt pocket and walk out the door," he said.

Years ago, Beer said, lawyers working on tobacco industry lawsuits asked him to give them R.J. Reynolds customer lists.

Privacy advocates rebelled last year against government efforts to co-mingle confidential law enforcement records, such as driving histories, with a private database held by Boca Raton, Fla.-based Seisint, a Choicepoint competitor. (Choicepoint has sued Seisint, accusing the company of replicating proprietary database technology its founder, Hank Asher, sold to Choicepoint years ago.)

Law enforcement officials touted Matrix --- Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange --- and its 20 billion records as an efficient way to catch criminals. But Georgia and a dozen other states have dropped out of the program or declined invitations to join because of privacy or cost concerns. Five states remain. Privacy advocates worried the data could be hacked or stolen, or that erroneous information would lead to police action against innocent citizens.

Mohr said Matrix's "central repository" is troubling. "It's too Big Brother, and it's too possible for all that information to get out."

Jay Patel, co-founder of the Internet-based information portal Abika, doesn't believe in privacy.

"Even if I want to keep it private I can't, so why try to hide it?" he asked.

His 3-year-old South Dakota company offers psychological profiles, unconventional behavior checks, sexual orientation checks and cheating checks among the 330 products available through its Web site.

Patel got his start tracing e-mail addresses for fun through his personal Web page. Requests to trace e-mail messages came in so fast, Patel decided on a whim to charge for the service, and people paid. Now, he says, he takes 10,000 orders a month for his services.

"You know why the tabloids get so much circulation? Because people like to talk about other people or know about other people," Patel said. "It's just human nature."

Patel said the company's "spider" search program --- similar to those used by search engines like Google --- scours the Internet for information about a person. It also signs up for thousands of chat rooms, including some set up specifically to air personal grievances, said Patel, a programmer.

"We have a simple rule: The more high technology you use, the easier it is to trace" information about you, he said.

Abika does a media sweep of newspaper and magazine articles. The company also purchases databases from companies that offer anything from subscriber lists to club membership rosters. Companies that go out of business often sell their customer database, often one of the few assets they have left. Grocery stores routinely sell and trade customer preference databases compiled from those ever-popular discount shopping cards, Patel said.

"You have to be ready," he said of the databases. "If you think it has value, you go and grab it."

Most of the databases prohibit Abika from reselling the raw information. Instead, Abika plugs the data into a mathematical formula Patel and others wrote that compares the subject with more than 60,000 profiles that have been verified as accurate. The program then spits out a supposed map of the subject's character.

Patel said the company constantly fine-tunes the program based on feedback, and he admits the profiles can be wrong or incomplete.....


The Bush administration classified as many records in its first two years as President Bill Clinton did during his last four, according to federal records. The rash of secrecy mostly came after the 2001 terrorist attacks, as officials rushed to secure the country.....


Staff researcher Sharon Gaus contributed to this article.

CHOICEPOINT AT A GLANCE:

--Location: Based in Alpharetta, with some data stored in Boca Raton, Fla.

--Revenues: $796 million in 2003; $729 million in 2002.

--Stock price: Opened in 1997 at about $10 a share; closed last week at about $38.

-----

To see more of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to www.ajc.com

[RPankn]

The number of disenfranchised has been revised to over 97,000.

But what I wonder is why Democrats insist on blaming Nader for Florida instead of confronting what Jeb and Harris did to the voting rolls. I have only heard a few Democrats every mention this.

And I'm honestly surprised, no shocked, the FDLE actually does do something.

[POA]

RPankn said:

The number of disenfranchised has been revised to over 97,000.

But what I wonder is why Democrats insist on blaming Nader for Florida instead of confronting what Jeb and Harris did to the voting rolls. I have only heard a few Democrats every mention this.

And I'm honestly surprised, no shocked, the FDLE actually does do something.

I think part of the reason why is because it would entail an admission from the Democrats as a whole entity* that the system in terms of letting states (or more accurately, state-based elites), have independent and unaccountable voting system standards is a dismal failure.

They'd rather stick with the system as-is and risk the possibility that it could work for them rather than fix it for everyone.

* I know that there are individual Democrats who have put in a lot of work to try and challenge this locally. But as a whole organization, the silence regarding these issues is truly deafening.

btw, Moses, great posts. It's going to take me a while to digest all of it.

POA

[Moses]

Let's face it. The Democrats don't mind disenfranchising blacks. Suits their purposes just fine.

They drool over getting Joe Nascar's vote, and bashing blacks or ignoring their issues plays nicely into the agenda of both parties.