Government employing brokers as data posse By Rebecca Carr
Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
Sunday, April 24, 2005
WASHINGTON - Federal agencies are using data brokers such as Seisint Inc. and ChoicePoint Inc. as a major investigative tool, despite concerns by some activists and lawmakers that the practice sidesteps a long-standing privacy law.
Federal agencies have spent at least $117 million on contracts with Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint since the company's inception in 1997, according to procurement data stored by the U.S. General Services Administration.
The federal government's dependency on ChoicePoint and other data brokers came up at a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee titled "Securing Electronic Personal Data: Striking a Balance Between Privacy and Commercial and Governmental Use."
At least five congressional panels have begin studying whether the largely unregulated data information industry needs more oversight since this winter, when it was revealed unauthorized people obtained personal data on 145,000 consumers from ChoicePoint and as many as 310,00 people at Seisint Inc., the Boca Raton-based unit of LexisNexis.
Federal investigators say data brokers are invaluable because they can access a wealth of personal data far faster than government computers.
"The FBI uses ChoicePoint and other public-source data brokers because it saves us time," FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said. "It certainly helps us gather information in criminal and terrorism investigations."
In minutes, investigators can access Social Security numbers, addresses, assets, lawsuits, liens, criminal histories and certificates of birth, marriage and gun ownership, and a host of other records on nearly every American - some 19 billion records in all.
More important, sometimes the private computers can connect data in ways the government's computers cannot.
ChoicePoint says it has helped law enforcement with major cases, including:
.Linking the 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
.Figuring out that the two snipers who paralyzed Washington in fall 2002, randomly killing 10 people, were not driving a white van as was widely reported but a Chevrolet Caprice sedan.
.Finding 800 missing children with a database that instantly alerts the National Center for Missing Children when a suspected abductor obtains a new address.
.Weeding out 288 felons from the 112,000 applicants for jobs at the newly formed Transportation Security Administration.
.Detecting 11,000 felons trying to volunteer with youth service organizations, including 42 registered sex offenders.
ChoicePoint Chief Marketing Officer James Lee said in an interview that one of the company's core missions is improving security for Americans by helping some 7,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies use its nimble databases. Law enforcement contracts make up about 5 percent of the company's revenue.
"Our products correlate records that the human eye might not," Lee said. "With law enforcement, the problem isn't too little information, it's too much information. We are able to refine the information."
ChoicePoint's best customer by far is the Justice Department, with $63.4 million in contracts since 1997, more than half the government total, according to federal procurement records. The records show that 36 federal agencies - ranging from the tiny Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service at the Department of Agriculture to the Treasury Department's mighty Internal Revenue Service - use the company's databases.
Some lawmakers, however, are questioning whether the federal contracts violate the spirit of the Privacy Act, which restricts the creation of government dossiers on U.S. citizens.
The 1974 law bars the federal government from secretly amassing personal information unless there is a "proper purpose." If a federal agency does start to collect data on a person, the law requires it to follow a cumbersome set of rules, such as giving notice and allowing subjects to correct mistakes.
Instead of dealing with the intricacies of the Privacy Act, federal investigators are tapping the databases of personal information compiled by private data brokers.
Loopholes in the law have allowed the government to pass the "binoculars from Big Brother" to businesses, said Rep. Janice Schakowsky, D-Ill., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection. "This very disturbing practice, while not illegal, violates the spirit of the Privacy Act."
Data brokers have become "arms of the government," said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, senior counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research organization in Washington.
The Privacy Act should be extended to cover ChoicePoint and other data brokers because they regularly serve as "private escrows for information" that the government could not otherwise collect, he said.
"Rather than comply with the Privacy Act, they hired a company" to obtain information, Hoofnagle said. "It's an end run around the law."
ChoicePoint's Lee said such searches do not violate the spirit of Privacy Act, which he said does not specifically address the role of data information companies. His company supports having a debate about how the government uses its information, he said.
"We have always supported there being a more formal framework around when information can be used by whom and how," Lee said. "So if Congress or the general public are concerned about the government's use of data, we have always said that it is a subject that needs to be discussed."
Privacy advocates note that there are few safeguards to keep the government from acting on inaccurate information in brokers' files.
Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow cites in his book No Place to Hide the case of a Florida man who was prevented from voting in the 2000 election because he was wrongly tagged as a felon by a data company that had been acquired by ChoicePoint. The company faulted state election officials for failing to verify the data.
The FBI says it trains agents before they can use ChoicePoint's database to ensure that the data isn't misused or abused. But other law enforcement agencies said they do not provide training, or declined to say.
Documents obtained by Electronic Privacy Information Center under the Freedom of Information Act dispute the FBI's assertion that it trains employees how to use ChoicePoint.
"There was almost no evidence of controls to prevent agency employees from misusing the databases," Hoofnagle said.
Of the agencies listed by the General Services Administration as having large contracts with ChoicePoint, none was able or willing to say how it used the data.
The U.S. Marshals Service, for example, spent $2.2 million on ChoicePoint data from 1998 to 2003, according to the procurement records. But Donald Hines, the chief of media relations for the agency, declined to comment on the details of the contracts, citing an exemption of the Freedom of Information Act.
However, a lawsuit triggered by the act prompted the Marshals Service and eight other agencies to provide 2,500 pages of documents about its contracts with ChoicePoint and other data brokers to the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
In one internal Marshals Service memo, the agency said it had found ChoicePoint's "capabilities particularly beneficial to criminal investigations.... With as little as a first name or a partial address, you can obtain a comprehensive personal profile in a matter of minutes."
In another document obtained by Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Marshals Service said it ran between 14,000 and 40,000 searches per month from February 1999 to September 2001. A document from the FBI's Public Source Information Program claims the use of commercial computer databases has increased by 9,600 percent since 1992.
The Privacy Act should be revamped to deal with the interaction between government and business that "contravenes the spirit of the Privacy Act," argued Daniel Solove, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School and author of The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age.
Solove likens ChoicePoint to a private-sector intelligence agency.
But Fred Cate, professor of law at Indiana University and an expert on privacy, said he does not see the federal government's use of data brokers as circumventing the law.
"It is certainly not legally wrong to buy data from ChoicePoint," Cate said.
Whether it raises moral and ethical questions is another issue, he said. For example, it would not bother most people if the government used data brokers to track people who don't pay their taxes, Cate said, but it would bother the public if the government used the databases for fishing expeditions.
Congress should focus on the how the data is used instead of trying to "regulate the whole store of information," Cate said.
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