Getting the 411: For the past three years the FBI and Defense Department have been paying a Georgia-based company for access to databases that contain billions of personal records about nearly every person — citizens and noncitizens alike — in the U.S.
According to federal documents obtained by National Journal and Government Executive, among services ChoicePoint provides the government is access to a previously undisclosed “exclusive” data-searching system. Thus, law enforcement and intelligence agents use the private data broker to do what they legally can’t — keep tabs on nearly every American citizen and foreigner in the United States.
ChoicePoint is the largest aggregator of public records on U.S. citizens and residents. The company has a database of more than 19 billion legally obtainedrecords that it mines to locate criminals and suspects, their family members and known associates, and their hidden financial assets.
Most of ChoicePoint’s customers are other companies, but the company’s work for the government is significant and growing. Using its DNA analysis lab, ChoicePoint helped identify victims of the September 11 attacks. The following year, the company helped locate the Washington-area snipers by leading investigators to the blue Chevrolet Caprice the two killers used.
Although it has generally been known that the FBI and intelligence agencies use ChoicePoint’s people-tracking skills, federal and company officials have refused to discuss their arrangements. But a set of contract documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that the government sought to withhold for almost two years, reveals details not previously reported about ChoicePoint’s work for the FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, called FTTTF or “F tre F.”
The task force was set up soon after the 9/11 attacks to assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in locating foreign terrorists and their supporters in the U.S. The task force can’t maintain records on U.S. persons without opening an official investigation, so it relies on ChoicePoint to supplement intelligence the government collects legally.
ChoicePoint has gone beyond simply offering its commercially available products to the government. In 2003, ChoicePoint provided access to an “exclusive” system that continuously tracks a “subject of interest” and notifies the government when new information on that person surfaces.
The exclusive service looks like something ChoicePoint built specifically for federal agencies, and that arrangement raises questions about whether the company is becoming an arm of the federal government.
ChoicePoint collects a variety of public records including concealed-weapons permits, marriage and death certificates, registrations for boats, aircraft, and automobiles; eviction notices, credit card information, hazardous materials handling permits and employment histories.
Writing in the George Washington Law Review last November, two members of the Center for Democracy and Technology wondered whether government’s use of private databases renders useless the federal Privacy Act, which is supposed to protect private information. “If the government is simply accessing databases created by commercial entities for their own reasons, there may be no system of records subject to Privacy Act requirements,” the members wrote.
U.S. citizens have few avenues to monitor how the government uses their personal data when it resides outside government hands.
In the wake of security breaches this year at ChoicePoint and other firms, in which identity thieves accessed people’s financial records, lawmakers have proposed bills that would rein in private data brokers and monitor how the government uses them. One bill, the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act, introduced by Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would require the government to establish rules protecting privacy and security when it hires data brokers, and to conduct regular audits of those contracts.
Privacy advocates following the bills say that they’re weaker than legislation being pushed through in state legislatures, and that no single congressional bill fully addresses all their concerns. But the legislation has data brokers’ attention — lobbying expenditures by private data collectors are up. And ChoicePoint has hired a number of lobby shops specializing in the executive branch. One hired last month is the Ashcroft Group, founded by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who oversaw establishment of the FBI task force in 2002.
Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says, however, that it is always hard to monitor what private contractors do: “Using contractors to perform sensitive intelligence or counterintelligence work, whether it’s prisoner interrogation in Iraq or data mining in D.C., is always problematic, because their activities are much harder to oversee. Unlike government agencies, contractors are not answerable to Congress. And the secrecy of most intelligence work makes them all but impervious to independent oversight. If they broke or bent the law, we might never find out.”
