For my first posting: A copy of the email i just sent to The NY Times and USA Today:
(With acknowledgement and thanks to writer Greg Palast.)
Dear Friends/NY Times Staff:
The Real Domestic Surveillance Story is Not The Phone Call Logging.
The following came to me from writer Greg Palast.
Please take a look at it. He has researched Choicepoint, the Republican-run data mining company that brought us, among other things, the false list of 94,000 "felons" that were removed from the voter rolls in Florida, pretty much for "voting while black". Which insured King George's taking of the throne.
They now have billions in contracts with Homeland Security, the FBI, et al. to collect and sell information on you and I and everyone to those organizations (including our DNA!)who couldn't collect it themselves, that would be illegal. But thanks to the Patriot Act (Ugh!), they can buy it from other companies.
This is a major story! Please don't ignore it. That would only increase the damage they are able to do.
Thank You.
Name Witheld
San Francisco
Greg Palast writes:
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company,
formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a
billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom?
That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking
this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire
personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration.
Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16
billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops
at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the
government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're
suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But
ChoicePoint can collect if for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush
Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic
spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country
club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar
daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone
was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside
information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC
team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had
ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election.
Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases,
Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave
Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus.
And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since
apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has
been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone
bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in
confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person
in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP
[ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they
gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to
seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to
the FBI.
"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since
left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are
not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's
more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding
Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering
ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that
didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in
Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase
145,000 credit card records.
But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile
tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR
is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such
as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided
lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former
Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush
(Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).
But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone
logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and
they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28:
"Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is
providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on
using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And
who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which
is NOT mentioned by the Times.
"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged
criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of
course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.
It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a
story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal
immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be
required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to
affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey,
someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy
owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.
The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together
because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters
re-write.
But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists
or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several
billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments
shorter.
And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the
shaft.
**********
Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?,
China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind
Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War, out June
6.
