Big Brother's little helper 

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It's a brilliant business. Because as much as we claim to love civil liberties, the bloodshed of 9-11 is centuries fresher than blood spilled for the Constitution. A company like ChoicePoint doesn't thrive because it manipulates our wants. It thrives because it's a product of them.

If ChoicePoint were a library, it might be the largest building on Earth. Its computers will soon hold 200 terabytes of information. Compare that to the Library of Congress, whose 18 million books would constitute a mere 20 terabytes. The company began as an insurance-claims division of Equifax, the Atlanta-based credit-reporting agency. In 1997, Equifax spun ChoicePoint off with an IPO. Over the years, the new entity would gobble 42 competitors and complementary companies, all of them gatherers of different varieties of data. The acquisitions ranged from the leading provider of birth, death, marriage and divorce certificates, VitalChek, to the country's largest private DNA forensics lab, Bode Technologies.

In less than a decade, ChoicePoint, which Business 2.0 listed as one of the country's 100 fastest-growing companies, has become a startling financial success. It pulled in almost $800 million in fiscal 2002 revenue. After six years of trading, the company's share price has shot up from less than $10 in 1997 to more than $37 last month.

One key to ChoicePoint's trajectory has been the government's reaction to 9-11. ChoicePoint is among a handful of companies that have jumped at the awesome opportunity to help the feds decrease the risk of another terrorist attack.

ChoicePoint believes that businesses, armed with as much information as possible, will be better able to protect themselves against fraud. Law enforcement will have an easier time solving crimes. And government will be better equipped to fight terrorism. This is the Information Age, after all. What's the point of having so much information if you can't use it?

The company's various databases have come in handy in several high-profile tasks. After 9-11, ChoicePoint's DNA lab, Bode Technologies, received thousands of fragments of human remains -- mostly bone -- and matched the fragments' DNA to DNA lifted from toothbrushes and combs provided by the victims' families. ChoicePoint even claims that had the government taken advantage of its airline passenger screening capabilities prior to 9-11, the 19 hijackers might never have boarded four planes.

But ChoicePoint's work also has revealed the inherent trouble posed by collecting massive amounts of personal information. Not only can mistakes be made but basic American rights can be jeopardized -- the right to vote, the right to be free from unreasonable searches, and the right not to be investigated on the government's whim.

This is the part of the story where you're supposed to be learning the details of dozens of contracts ChoicePoint has signed with the feds. Instead, we're presented with a checks-and-balances breakdown -- and the irony that a company, built on the foundation that information on private citizens should be collected and disseminated at will, is shrouded from scrutiny.

Theoretically at least, the public can view the government's contracts with data-collectors under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). But in response to FOIA requests I filed with a half-dozen federal departments, the excuses for withholding information range from the somewhat understandable need to protect "trade secrets" and "national security" (and therefore keep secret a few hundred pages) to the months-long backlogs that force many agencies to put requests on indefinite hold.

I managed to get records from just two federal departments -- a pittance considering ChoicePoint has claimed to hold contracts with close to 40 federal agencies.

Although the IRS withheld 179 pages of the records I requested, the 80 pages it did hand over describe a renewable, annual contract totaling $5 million and signed in August 2000. The contract grants the IRS online access to as many as 19 distinguishing data sets that ChoicePoint keeps on most Americans, including property records, incorporated businesses, bankruptcies, civil judgments and motor vehicle info.

The other contract I received, signed by the Justice Department in 2001 and totaling $67 million, describes 141 categories of personal information ChoicePoint provides federal law enforcement, such as Social Security numbers, neighbors' identities, driver's license numbers and a service called "Faces of the Nation."

Another Justice Department document, a memo titled "Guidance Regarding the Use of ChoicePoint," states that the feds are to gather intelligence using "the least intrusive means." It goes on to say that, "an individual does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in personal information that is made publicly available by others."

Privacy advocates argue otherwise. When it comes to the definition of information "made publicly available by others," Chris Hoofnagle, an attorney for the D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), claims public records taken out of their original context and lumped together are no longer "public" at all -- especially if only select customers can pay to see them.