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The Spies Who Shag Us
The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Greg Palast
I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your
phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a
strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy
network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to
protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI
-- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
********************
For the full story, see "Double
Cheese With Fear," in
"Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf and Other Dispatches from the Front
Lines of the Class
War."
********************
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 it
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 rewarded
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.
A BUZZFLASH
GUEST CONTRIBUTION
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. You can order
it now.
For more horror and humor from the War on Terror, listen to an excerpt from
Chapter 1 of Armed Madhouse, Double cheese with fear. |
