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Excerpt:  As data broker ChoicePoint wrestles with the fallout from the sale of personal data to identity thieves and an investigation into two executives' sale of company stock, it faces questions on another front: its background-checking services.

Several lawsuits and consumer complaints in the last few years have accused ChoicePoint of providing inaccurate and out-of-date information in its criminal background reports, resulting in unfair job losses for applicants.

Excerpt:  Catch that? ChoicePoint actually has no idea if only 145,000 customers were affected by its recent security debacle. But it's not doing any work to determine if more than 145,000 customers were affected -- or if any customers before July 1, 2003 were affected -- because there's no law compelling it to do so.

ChoicePoint data stolen by imposters

# They've known about this since last October. But now that it's in the news, "ChoicePoint says it will notify all potential victims." My, how civic minded of them.   =Sir J=

# Isn't it ironic; the corporation that has the largest database of information on people is duped by 'imposters'?   =Mr. Cieciel=

Excerpt:  The Mexican federal attorney's office confirmed Wednesday that its investigators searched the offices of the Mexican company Soluciones Mercadologicas en Bases de Datos and the homes of three of its employees. Investigators said they found documents possibly pertaining to the sale of personal information on Mexicans to ChoicePoint Inc., an Atlanta-based information gathering company.

Excerpt:  ChoicePoint literature advertising its services to the Department of Justice includes the promise of a "national registry file of all adult Colombians, including date and place of birth, gender, parentage, physical description, marital status ... passport number, and registered profession."

It is illegal under Colombian law for government agencies to disclose such information, except in response to a request for data on a named individual.

Excerpt:  The controversy is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint. The company's subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes.

Excerpt:  Uncle Sam is watching more of you, which may come as no surprise, given the post-terrorist reality of Sept. 11.

What may be surprising is that even before the attacks, the United States was quietly purchasing dossiers on millions of citizens in 10 Latin American countries from an Alpharetta-based firm. The reason: to help verify the identities of Latin American nationals accused of committing crimes in the United States and help in the larger effort to find potential terrorists.

Now, ChoicePoint, the firm that collected the data, finds itself the target of growing criticism abroad and investigations in Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico over whether privacy laws were violated. Latin American media have decried the company's actions, including what Mexico claims was the illegal sale of confidential voter registration records of more than 65 million of its citizens.

Excerpt:  The Florida Republicans wanted to block African Americans, who largely vote as Democrats, from voting. In 1999 they fired the company they were paying $5,700 to compile their felony “scrub” lists and replaced them with Database Technologies [DBT], who they paid $2.3 million to do the same job. [DBT is the Florida division of Choicepoint, a massive database company that does extensive work for the FBI.]

Excerpt:  The Associated Press reported on Friday that Atlanta, Georgia-based ChoicePoint Inc. said it bought official registry files from subcontractors in Nicaragua, as well as Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The company has refused to name the sellers or say where those parties obtained the data.

Excerpt:  Information supplied by the company, Database Technologies (DBT), led to tens of thousands of Floridians being removed from the electoral roll on the grounds that they had felonies on their records.

However, a Guardian investigation in December confirmed by Newsnight found that the list was riddled with mistakes that led to thousands of voters -- a disproportionate number of them black -- being wrongly disenfranchised.

The scale of the errors, and their skewed effect on black, overwhelmingly Democratic voters, cost Al Gore thousands of votes in Florida in an election that George Bush won by just 537 votes. Moreover the Florida state government, where Mr Bush's brother Jeb is governor, did nothing to correct the errors, and may have encouraged them.

Excerpt:  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.

Excerpt:  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.

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