Despite Choicepoint’s highly publicized recent security breaches, the handshake between governmental entities and commercial data brokers – such as Choicepoint and Acxiom — appears to continue unabated. Incredibly, after this year’s debacle in which Choicepoint exposed almost 145,000 citizens’ information to criminals posing as legitimate customers, the United States government continues its relationship with Choicepoint as though nothing has happened.
The Internal Revenue Service just signed a $20M deal with Choicepoint, under which “ChoicePoint will provide information on the general public for the IRS’ batch processing projects, which involve generating information on specific segments of the population.”
Huh? Whatever this means, it sounds like business as usual between the data brokers (companies that I have termed shadow offenders in a forthcoming piece) and our government. Choicepoint continues to hand over sophisticated profiles of individual citizens to governmental entities, information that the federal government is generally restricted from compiling on its own under the Privacy Act of 1974. The government keeps the Choicepoint’s and Acxiom’s of the world up and running, fueling them with multi-million dollar contracts despite continued security breaches. Sen. Patrick Leahy has expressed dismay at the status quo and has drafted legislation that would “protect Americans from identity theft through leaked or lost personal data.” That’s a start, but we ought to start questioning the very existence of data brokers such as Choicepoint, rather than merely attempting to minimize identity theft and security breaches.
Posted by Marcy Peek on June 29, 2005 at 02:30 PM
Comments
I have always thought Choicepoint was ripe for a Title III Americans With Disabilities lawsuit. I wonder what would happen if IRS was sued under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 for methods of administration involving Choicepoint’s Title III ADA violations, and someone invoked the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights against Choicepoint thru the ADA’s “incorporation” clause, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 12101(b)(4), in essence amending Title III of the ADA to include monetary damages under the ADA’s “incorporation” of the ICCPR (privacy art.). The only problem I would have with the IRS, is the fact it is using Choicepoint, notorious for recording very wrong information about people and for “perpetuating” Title III ADA reasonable accommodations violations of the people and entities who report the info to Choicepoint’s data base where due to the accommodations violations the info cannot be contested by the injured party. So much damage is done to disabled people this way.
Posted by: Mary Katherine Day-Petrano | Jun 29, 2005 6:28:33 PM
This pisses me off. When did small government conservatism morph into government support of big and sometimes harmful business conservatism?
Posted by: Jeff V. | Jun 29, 2005 4:27:20 PM