Has no one noticed the scandal around ChoicePoint?

[JackRiddler]

ChoicePoint in the news, right now:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=choicepoint&btnG=Search+News

145,000 identities stolen by from this personal information troller by "scammers"... national waves...

But no one in the MSM seems to recall Florida, 2000, ChoicePoint as the scrubber of alleged "felons" from the voter rolls. (And this goes back to the very origins of Democratic Underground!)

A refresher. The Salon story of the year 2000, by Greg Palast:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=55&row=1

Any possible connection to the present scandal?

What's out there in terms of dirt on this company? Anyone have new findings handy?

Palast:

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program - Salon.com's politics story of the year
www.Salon.com
Monday, December 4, 2000

If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that included purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.

Early in the year, the company, 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. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list -- the state of Texas.

Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by Texas back on voter rolls before the election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered in individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible voters may have been turned away at the polls.

Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to "cleanse" voter rolls.The state signed in 1998 a $4 million contract with DBT Online, since merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta. The creation of the scrub list, called the central voter file, was mandated by a 1998 state voter fraud law, which followed a tumultuous year that saw Miami's mayor removed after voter fraud in the election, with dead people discovered to have cast ballots. The voter fraud law required all 67 counties to purge voter registries of duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons, many of whom, but not all, are barred from voting in Florida.

...and so much more...

[DeepModem Mom]

1. See this thread posted re. ChoicePoint and DOJ, CIA

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1167214

In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth Of Personal Data

By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page A01


It began in 1997 as a company that sold credit data to the insurance industry. But over the next seven years, as it acquired dozens of other companies, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. became an all-purpose commercial source of personal information about Americans, with billions of details about their homes, cars, relatives, criminal records and other aspects of their lives.

As its dossier grew, so did the number of ChoicePoint's government and corporate clients, jumping from 1,000 to more than 50,000 today. Company stock once worth about $500 million ballooned to $4.1 billion.

Now the little-known information industry giant is transforming itself into a private intelligence service for national security and law enforcement tasks. It is snapping up a host of companies, some of them in the Washington area, that produce sophisticated computer tools for analyzing and sharing records in ChoicePoint's immense storehouses. In financial papers, the company itself says it provides "actionable intelligence."....

***

ChoicePoint and other private companies increasingly occupy a special place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts, in part because they can compile information and use it in ways government officials sometimes cannot because of privacy and information laws.

ChoicePoint renewed and expanded a contract with the Justice Department in the fall of 2001. Since then, the company and one of its leading competitors, LexisNexis Group, have also signed contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide public records online, according to newly released documents....

[EVDebs]

2. And the simultaneous hack at SanDiego's SAIC with intel personnel IDs

Back in April 2004 SAIC was hacked
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8995-2004Apr13

and again recently this week "Identity theft feared after break-in at top firm"
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002178882_saic13.html

Major security breaches or deliberate selective thefts for domestic spying purposes. Take your pick.

[Extend a Hand]

3. and look at the felon that developed the software

http://www.subliminalnews.com/archives/000079.php

from this site:

MATRIX is run by a private company in Boca Raton, FL called Seisint Inc. Incredibly, the company's founder, millionaire Hank Asher, was a pilot in a large drug smuggling ring in 1980s that was base in the Bahamas. He turned informant and was never charged. However, when the St. Petersburg (FL) Times revealed prosecutors' documents filed in Chicago which identified Asher as a drug runner, Seisint's board forced Asher to resign. http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20030803/northwest/67537_ARC.shtml and http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/breaking_news/6653117.htm> Asher is also a major donor to the Republican Party.

Just in case you've been living under a rock for 20 years, during the 1980s the CIA protected Nicaraguan Contras who smuggled tons of Colombian cocaine into the US in order to help finance the illegal "covert" war against the Sandinista government, a war which also intentionally targeted the civilian population. One of the known transshipment points in the Contra drug smuggling was, in fact, the Bahamas.

But wait, it gets better. Drug-runner Asher's first company was none other than DBT Online, the very company that played such a crucial and controversial role in the 2000 presidential election in Florida.

DBT Online (which merged with ChoicePoint just before the 2000 election) had the contract to purge Florida's voting rolls of convicted felons. As first revealed by journalist Greg Palast, DBT/ChoicePoint used a fraudulent list that originated in the state of Texas to wrongly "scrub" some 8,000 voters -- overwhelming black and/or Democrat -- of their voting rights, people who never should have been purged.