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Posted on 04/14/2003 12:12:11 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Over the past 18 months, the U.S. government has bought access to data on hundreds of millions of residents of 10 Latin American countries -- apparently without their consent or knowledge -- allowing myriad federal agencies to track foreigners entering and living in the United States.
A suburban Atlanta company, ChoicePoint Inc., collects the information abroad and sells it to U.S. government officials in three dozen agencies, including immigration investigators who've used it to arrest illegal immigrants.
The practice broadens a trend that has an information-hungry U.S. government increasingly buying personal data on Americans and foreigners alike from commercial vendors including ChoicePoint and LexisNexis.
U.S. officials consider the foreign data a thread in a security blanket that lets law enforcers and the travel industry peer into the backgrounds of people flowing into the United States. The information can also be used with other data-mining tools to identify potential terrorists, or simply unmask fake identity documents, company and government officials say.
"Our whole purpose in life is to sell data to make the world a safer place," said ChoicePoint's chief marketing officer, James Lee. "There is physical danger in not knowing who someone is. What risks do people coming into our country represent? You may accept that risk, but you want to know about it."
Privacy experts in Latin America question whether the sales of national citizen registries have been legal. They say government data are often sold clandestinely by individual government employees.
ChoicePoint appears to be the largest -- perhaps the only -- vendor of foreigners' personal details, selling entire national identity databases from Latin America since 2001.
The data encompass the personal details of people living in countries from Mexico to Argentina, people who probably never imagined officials in Washington could, with a few keystrokes, read identity files meant for functionaries in Mexico City, San Salvador or Bogota.
"It's the globalization of a very unfortunate American consumer problem," said Robert Ellis Smith, a lawyer who monitors credit agencies as publisher of Privacy Journal.
Smith says Latin governments ought to protect their citizens by passing privacy laws similar to European statutes that prohibit wholesale purchases of personal information.
In Mexico, where there is already keen mistrust of the U.S. government, most citizens would be outraged to learn their addresses, passport numbers and even unlisted phone numbers are being sold to Washington, said Julio Tellez Valdes, a law professor and data protection expert at the Monterrey Technical Institute.
"We let the Mexican government control our situation, but not the U.S. government," Tellez said. "We don't live in America."
ChoicePoint says it buys the files from subcontractors in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.
From Brazil, ChoicePoint sells telephone numbers and details on business leaders. The company recently stopped updating its citizen registry from Argentina, because of a lack of demand and restrictions of a new privacy law, said Lee, the marketing director.
The files originate in agencies that register voters or issue national IDs and drivers licenses. ChoicePoint provided partial copies of contracts, which required contractors to certify they've bought the information legally.
ChoicePoint does not sell data on U.S. citizens to foreign governments.
In Mexico, ChoicePoint said it buys driving records of 6 million Mexico City residents and the country's voter registry and provides them to the U.S. government.
If the voter records originated with Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute, the sales are illegal, said Victor Aviles, the institute's spokesman.
"If someone sold it, he is committing a crime," Aviles said.
Tellez said low-level government workers routinely sell electronic data to marketers and pocket the profits.
A proposed privacy law under debate could hand prison terms to those who sell information on Mexicans without their permission. The bill, which also criminalizes sending Mexican data to the United States, is being opposed by the U.S. Direct Marketing Association.
In Colombia, ChoicePoint buys the entire country's citizen ID database, including each resident's date and place of birth, passport and national ID number, parentage and physical description.
"I don't believe 31 million Colombians authorized that," said Nelson Remolina, a Colombian lawyer and privacy expert, referring to the number of records ChoicePoint obtained. The Colombian government is only supposed to divulge records requested by name, or when permission is granted by the subject.
ChoicePoint isn't just interested in Latin Americans. But Lee said the company's attempts to collect personal data elsewhere haven't fared well.
The company is prohibited from buying data troves in Europe and other regions with strict privacy laws, or where governments refuse to sell citizen data. ChoicePoint also operated in Hong Kong, South Korea and other East Asian countries until demand dried up a few years ago.
Last year, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, paid $1 million for unlimited access to ChoicePoint's foreign databases, according to a contract provided by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
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