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ChoicePoint Data Stolen By Imposters
swight1701 writes "Criminals posing as legitimate businesses have accessed critical personal data stored by ChoicePoint Inc., a firm that maintains databases of background information on virtually every U.S. citizen. The incident involves a wide swath of consumer data, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit reports and other information. ChoicePoint notified between 30,000 and 35,000 consumers in California that their personal data may have been accessed by "unauthorized third parties." No obvious notice appears to be on their website."
No Place To Hide
It was truely disturbing. Now that we're permanently at war with the Forces Of Evil (terrorists, for now) people should get used to not having any privacy. Sigh.
Remember the Florida election of 2000 when a private database company scrubbed thousands of eligible voters from the rolls? Well now one of the co-founders of Database Technologies is back in the headlines -- he's working with law enforcement agents in Florida to create what may soon expand into a national surveillance system. We talk with privacy expert Wayne Madsen, investigative reporter Greg Palast and a top intelligence official from the state of Florida.
s .h tm
8 /0 7/1427223
When is Joe Six pack going to wake up to the fact that in secret the government has conspired to create a dossier on every citzen in this country and this is who they hired to do it:
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!
In 1992, 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.
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/oh_republican
A Florida law enforcement data-sharing network is about to go national. In the name of counterterrorism, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are pouring millions of dollars into the system to expand it to local law enforcement agencies across the nation. It's called Matrix, which stands for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. According to the Washington Post, the computer network accesses information that has always been available to investigators but brings it together and enables police to access it with extraordinary speed. Civil liberties and privacy groups say the Matrix system dramatically increases the ability of local police to snoop on individuals.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/0
The Florida company that built the database was founded by the man behind ChoicePoint and Database Technologies. The companies administered the contract that stripped thousands of African Americans from the Florida voter roles before the 2000 election.
Although narrower in scope than John Poindexter's controversial Terrorist Global Information Awareness program, Matrix may serve a similar purpose because it provides unprecedented access to US residents regardless of their criminal background. And states are eager to participate in the new program. On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to launch a pilot program in state law enforcement data-sharing among Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York.
according to a new federal law, The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (passed in Dec 2003) you are entitled to a free comprehensive credit report yearly. The big three have an official website at www.annualcreditreport.com (no link b/c they reject unofficial referals) where you can claim your report. (though its not available yet for the mid and eastern states, it will be by the end of 2005).
Supposing my identity stolen and used for fraudelent activity. If we could trace the identity theft back to ChoicePoint, could they be held liable (in any sense of the word)?
Ordinarily in a case like this a class action would be brought against the company. The "Class Action Fairness Act" will shift class actions from state to federal court. Ostensibly this was done to prevent venue shopping- where you look for the state with the most favorable laws for your class action suit- but it also has the nice property that federal courts rarely agree to hear class action lawsuits, citing differences in state law. The Act effectively puts an end to all class action suits without explicitly banning them.
If you're a victim of identity theft because your Social Security number was compromised by ChoicePoint, you'll have to hire a lawyer yourself, prove that the identity theft was a result of ChoicePoint's negligence, and your case will be heard separately from those filed by any other plantiffs.
When they lose the data, as far as they are concerned they have lost some of their business information (ie. someone accessed their data without paying).
That the data is about you, and could be damaging to you is incosequential to them. Anyone could have bought the data from them anyway.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The databases basically involve public records from every county in a state describing ownership, professional licenses, et cetera. They often include every piece of information involved in submitting a request for some type of certification. Land deeds, for example, are in there, as well as contractor's licenses. A lot of that information is public record, but the stuff that isn't is the address (that's sometimes but very rarely public) and sometimes social security number. If you can establish that someone was at a certain address, and get a social from that address, hopefully correlating it with another address and matching (or near-matching) social security number, then you can look that ssn up in connection with all kinds of other items. This can connect them to any number of other people who you can bother for their phone number.
Eventually, you can find property, and depending on what state it's in you can sometimes take it away. California makes it pretty hard to do that kind of stuff to someone; you can't take away a home which is also a business, for example, and you can't take away someone's primary automobile -- unless you're the lien holder, that is. Or, well, the federal government.
Notice above I said something about a near-matching SSN? All of this stuff is near-matching. The problem is that someone might write their name (or other information) carefully in one place and illegibly in another. They might of course also forget or "forget" the number and misenter it. Finally, let us not forget the wonders of data entry and the errors therein. Some forms are OCR'd (anything typed) and some were probably hand entered. The record only goes back so far as well, but it's generally pretty far.
Anyway, anyone with a business that has a reason to need to do that kind of thing can get access to those databases. They can tell what you were doing with it, so if you do something naughty, they could tell.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Fraud is a cost of business to credit card companies
as a holder of a merchant account, I can say that you're full of shit. WE bear the brunt of fraud (a.k.a. "Chargebacks")... not only do we lose the money, but we get charged a nice little fee along with it. (usually around $30-40).
oh yeah, and get more than $x percent chargebacks in a year, your account goes *poof*
The IRS is way ahead of you, that's what ITINs and ATINs are for.
As someone noted, Choicepoint/Database Technologies are the guys who were paid to scrub Felons from the Florida list of eligible voters before the 2000 & 2004 elections. If you live here you read about em in the papers constantly for shady activity, & they were in a few documentaries about the elections. They were paid an insane amount of money ($4 million no bid contract, see Jeb Bush, FL governor) for what they did, and did a horrible job in return. A few of the problems were they only matched parts of names, not whole names, gender, race, etc...so a black guy w/ a partial name match to a white felon would be unable to vote. This ended up disenfranchising thousands of black voters (frequently democrats) in the 2000 election where Bush only won by 500-600 votes in the state, which led to him winning the election.
A few years ago I applied for a mortgage, and got refused because the bank did a credit check with Experian, Experian told them I wasn't on the electoral register, so the bank turned me down. I knew I was on the electoral register, and had been for years. I went to the local council for my previous residence, and the helpful council officer checked my record, and even let me come round the desk and look at her screen to see my record. I phoned Experian "I know I am on the electoral register for this address" (Experian) "no, sorry sir, this isn't on your record" (me) "I'm looking at my name on the electoral register, I'm just handing you over to the council officer who will confirm" (nice govt. officer): "yes, he is" (Experian "ahh... we'll look into that" (me): "cheers, I've been turned down already for a mortgage, are there any other parts of my credit records you should be checking?".
I really recommend that anybody in the UK who is about to buy a house/car/other significant credit transaction to ask for their records first. Which of course costs you money that goes into the credit agencies pockets. It's a corrupt system, and there's nothing we can do about it. Private companies running (ruining?) peoples' lives. "Sue the company" might be ok for you big shots but I was on low wages then and I'm a student now. One day I'll be working again and the first thing I got to do is use *my time* and *my money* to unpick *their mistakes*. Experian's mistake f*cked up my life, be wary people.