SUGGBLOG
There’s a solution to the dire threat posed to every American by ChoicePoint, the Atlanta-based “data miner” that has been cheerfully selling your most sensitive personal information to any Tom, Dick and Scumbag who ponies up a little cash. As we’ve reported (http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/2003-12-31/news_cover.html), plenty of smoke has been wafting from ChoicePoint’s robo-snoops for years, but that has elicited little mainstream press or regulatory interest.
ChoicePoint sells info-tidbits such as your Social Security number, what’s in your wallet and just about anything else about you that can be gleaned and stuffed into a computer.
As disclosed in recent days, this corporate Orwellian nightmare didn’t much care to whom it auctioned your data. Those “customers” included swarms of “identity thieves,” who stole the digital life histories of 145,000 Americans, or maybe it’s 4 million. The large spread in numbers depends on whose account you choose to believe, and as we’ll see, you can file anything ChoicePoint avers under “unadulterated hokum.”
“ChoicePoint gives away the best tools in the burglar’s tool kit, and most people aren’t even aware this company exists and can ruin their lives,” says Daniel Solove, who last year authored a book, The Digital Person, which augured recent disclosures about the company.
My solution? ChoicePoint and every similar bottom feeder in digital info-streams should be dismantled brick by brick and database by database.
ChoicePoint bosses likely agree that my solution, or something equally draconian, is in the offing. When identity purloiners first surfaced in a California investigation in October (four months before the company clued in victims), ChoicePoint’s two top boys began dumping almost $21 million in stock. Other investors are now stuck with stock in freefall.
But that brand of weasel corporate management, so commonplace nowadays, isn’t why I want ChoicePoint ground into dust. Rather, the company committed a far more heinous crime than lax security — it overthrew democracy in . . .
Want more? Sure you do. Senior Editor John Sugg has been launched into the blogosphere. You can read the rest of this column, and much, much more from the Pundit from the Piedmont and Bloviator of Blue Ridge, at www.johnsugg.com. You can reach him at john.sugg@creativeloafing.com.
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2005.
