ChoicePoint to Pay $15M Over Data Breach

[420inTN]

(This is the same company behind the "purging" of voter roles in FL pre-2000 election)

By HARRY R. WEBER, AP Business Writer 42 minutes ago

ATLANTA - The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday
that data warehouser ChoicePoint Inc. will pay $15
million to settle charges that its security and
record-handling procedures violated consumers' privacy
rights and federal laws.

The FTC said it had fined the Alpharetta-based company
$10 million — the biggest the agency has ever imposed
— and that Choicepoint would pay an additional $5
million that will be used to compensate consumers.

Company shares sank more than 6 percent on a day it
also reported a more than 29 percent decline in its
fourth-quarter profit.

Choicepoint had revealed last year that its massive
database of consumer information was accessed by
thieves.

more, full story here: here

[phoebe]

1. "scrubbing voter rolls in Florida" (black voters) Choicepoint

for those that don't remember

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=206&row=2

snip

It probably doesn't ring a bell, but ChoicePoint was the firm that Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State during the 2000 elections, paid to erase 57,000 names from the voter rolls.

Supposedly, these were convicted felons forbidden to vote in Florida, but 90% of them turned out to be innocent of any crime--except perhaps Voting While Black. Over half the innocent voters on the list were black, and had they been allowed to exercise their voting rights, Gore would have whipped Bush in Florida.

snip

ChoicePoint, Palast reports, is a database company with prominent Republicans on its board and payroll, and it now offers up over 20 billion pieces of information on American citizens to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Since passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the feds can access all that formerly private info without a search warrant.

The PATRIOT Act also requires banks to make their databases accessible to info-operators such as ChoicePoint, so a company called Sybase has started selling a "PATRIOT-compliant" software patch. The lucky big investor in Sybase? Winston Partners, founded by presidential brother Marvin Bush.

[Judi Lynn]

2. This is just too offensive. From the article:

The data breach involved thieves posing as small business customers who gained access to ChoicePoint's database, possibly compromising the personal information of 163,000 Americans, according to the FTC. The company discovered the breach more than four months before disclosing it to the public in February 2005. ChoicePoint has said authorities asked it to keep the information secret initially.
(snip/...)

What a damned shame these preditors were ever able to put this monstrous company together.