Is ChoicePoint the scariest company ever?

[Alpharetta]

To me, they ARE the matrix.

If you want a job, your prospective employer checks with them to see if you've been a good boy.

If you want a loan, same deal. If you want insurance, same deal.

And it's not like they're Equifax where you can find out what they have on file for you. Choicepoint is a NATIONAL SECURITY database. One blip of a bit and you are labeled a terrorist and will never fly on planes again. And you won't know until the next time you go to the airport.

Look at the 60,000 voters Choicepoint struck from Florida's rolls before the 2000 election. Do they have any recourse? No way. Choicepoint could ruin their lives even worse than taking away their vote.

Besides, if you complain, you're just siding with the terrorists and probably not very patriotic.

So when 140,000+ people had their personal data exposed by Choicepoint's desire for a buck and willingness to give any criminal access to their database, do you see those 140,000 people complaining? No way. You do not screw with the matrix.

[arcane1]

1. they are indeed incredibly scary, however...

Monsanto scares me more :scared:

[4morewars]

3. That's what I was going to say !

I loathe that company !

[The Straight Story]

2. How have the Amish survived without it :)

Perhaps we should target our work on the companies that utilize the tools as much if not more than the tool itself. Without a demand, their won't be a supply.

[Al-CIAda]

4. Choicepoint articles-

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program - Salon.com's politics story of the year
www.Salon.com
Monday, December 4, 2000
E-Mail Article
Printer Friendly Version
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

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

Ground Zero as Profit Center
by Greg Palast
published by GregPalast.com

Not one single U.S. citizen hijacked a plane, yet President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft, through powers seized and codified in the USA PATRIOT Act, fingered 270 million of us for surveillance, for searches, for tracking, for watching.

And who was going to play Anti-Santa, watching to see when we've been good or bad? A guy named Derek Smith.

And that made September 11, 2001 Derek's lucky day.

Even before the spying work could begin, there were all those pieces of people to collect—tubes marked “DM” (for “Disaster Manhattan”)—from which his company, ChoicePoint Inc, would extract DNA for victim identification, work for which the firm would receive $12 million from New York City’s government.

http://www.progressivetrail.org/articles/040908Palast.shtml

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Bush failed to get Osama. But we did successfully eliminate the threat of Congresswoman McKinney -- you remember, the one who dared question ChoicePoint, the company that helped Katherine Harris eliminate Black voters.

Following our BBC broadcast and Guardian report in November 2001, McKinney cited our stories on the floor of Congress, calling for an investigation of the intelligence failures and policy prejudices you've just read here. She was labeled a traitor, a freak, a conspiracy nut and "a looney" -- the latter by her state's Democratic Senator, who led the mob in the political lynching of the uppity Black woman.
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That leaves one final, impertinent question. Who won? "The war on terror hasn't been decided yet, but a few winners are emerging," business magazine Forbes says cheerily. "Background checking services . . . are high up on the list of businesses that will benefit from government proposal to beef up security in the world's largest economy . . . services provided by companies like... ChoicePoint Inc., would increase further when the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service steps up immigrant tracking."

http://www.thinkingpeace.com/Lib/lib016.html

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Greg Palast on ChoicePoint

On September 11, 2001, we Americans were the victims of a terrible attack.

By September 12, we became the suspects.

Not one single U.S. citizen hijacked a plane, yet President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft, through powers seized and codified in the USA PATRIOT Act, fingered 270 million of us for surveillance, for searches, for tracking, for watching.

And who was going to play Anti-Santa, watching to see when we've been good or bad?  A guy named Derek Smith.

And that made September 11, 2001 Derek's lucky day.

Even before the spying work could begin, there were all those pieces of people to collect - tubes marked "DM" (for "Disaster Manhattan") - from which his company, ChoicePoint Inc, would extract DNA for victim identification, work for which the firm would receive $12 million from New York City's government.

Maybe Smith, like the rest of us, grieved at the murder of innocent friends and countrymen. As for the 12-million-dollar corpse identification fee, that's chump change to the $4 billion corporation Smith had founded only four years earlier in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Nevertheless, for Smith's ChoicePoint Inc., Ground Zero would become a profit center lined with gold.

As the towers fell, ChoicePoint's stock rose; and from Ground Zero, contracts gushed forth from War on Terror fever.  Why? Because this outfit is holding no less 16 billion records on every living and dying being in the USA.  They're the Little Brother with the filing system when Big Brother calls.

ChoicePoint's quick route to no-bid spy contracts was not impeded by the fact that the company did something for George W. Bush that the voters would not: select him as our president.

http://www.flashpoints.net/palast/Greg_Palast_On_ChoicePoint.html

[rigel99]

5. It's time for a full on DIVESTITURE campaign

With all the Press noise about the thousands of identities stolen from Choicepoint, and all that happened was a 6% stock loss...

Guys, we have to battle these companies where it hurts, their pocketbooks. It's time for a full on divestiture campaign.. get MoveOn and all the other groups to encourage you divest in the following list of Mutual funds (which contain CPS as a stock).


It's time for citizen action on this one... anyone up for some very interesting letter writing????