Any contractor that can use Microsoft Office, or keep Windows stable on any system, much less discuss it here, has earned my respect.
However, Consumer Reports shows no individual talent is extraordinary enough to prevent the sale of their personal information, which leads to ID theft, asset theft, and even murder.
"CR Investigates Your Privacy for Sale", Consumer Reports Magazine, October 2006, pp 41-45.
The "CR Quick Take" one the first page, summarizes this article as follows.
"Large data brokers have your numbers--Social Security, phone, and credit cards. They might also know about the drugs you take, what you buy, your political party, and your sexual orientation. When we investigated this secretive industry, we discovered:
* Data broker are willing to sell even your most sensitive information to paying customers, some of them crooks.
* Pretexters, who lie to get information about you and sell it to anybody, operate largely free of regulation."
Page 42 continues:
"But most of this list creation comes from consumer behavior, whether it is buying from catalogs, ordering magazines, joining associations, or filling our warranty cards.."
From page 43:
"The three major data brokers have all suffered major breaches in recent years, although only ChoicePoint thus far has led to censure by the Federal Trade Commission. It slapped the company with a $10 million fine, the largest civil penalty in agency history.
..the company released data to crooks whose requests used commercial mail drops as business addresses.. As it turned out, a Nigerian fraud ring was behind the breach..
To date, says Brian Hoffstadt, an assistant U.S. attorney who co-prosecuted the case against the data thieves, $600,000 worth of fraudulent credit-card charges have been documented ..and we may not know the true impact for quite a while," Hoffstadt says.
The article gets worse as it describes the Pentagon, military recruiters, and FBI as ChoicePoint's largest customers.
"When EPIC filed a request under the freedom of information Act in 2001 to obtain copies of records relating to federal agencies' use of data brokers, among the documents it received as a Jan 13, 2000, PowerPoint slide presentation with ChoicePoint and Federal Bureau of Investigation logos displayed together above the report's title: "A Partnership for the New Millennium." All other text on the slides had been blacked out, and to date, the FBI has failed to deliver 5,000 additional pages of ChoicePoint contracting documents."
"The data industry has a shady element that includes private investigators and others who practice so-called pretexting: impersonating a relative, company officials, or even law-enforcement personnel to obtain confidential consumer information.
The results can be deadly. Case in point: Amy Boyer of Nashua, N.H, was fatally gunned down by Liam Youens, a stalker, as she left work. Youens had obtained, for less than $200, all of the information he needed to track her from an online data broker that, court papers say, hired a pretexter to find out where she worked..
The murder occurred in 1999, but similar "backgounding" services have only grown. Rob Douglas, founder of PrivacyToday.com, Information-Security consultants, says, "With the advent of the Internet, data brokers learned how much money could be made selling phone and bank records to customers online, and the feeding frenzy was on.."
Customers buying covertly obtained information range from large corporations.. to snoops.. According to statements that some data brokers have provided to congressional investigators..
A few flegling efforts to combat the release of personal information have made headway..
To get legislators' attention, she demonstrated the potential for harm in January 2005 by posting on her own Web site (
www.theviriniawatchdog.com) a few Social Security numbers for people whose records she spotted online. Among them: former CIA Director Porter Goss, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who's number was blacked out on Dade County online records after she drew attention to it. "I understand why he'd want to black out his number," Ostergren says, "But shouldn't everyone have that right?"
