He's vey knowledgeable of what is legal and what shmells. :)
Posted on 07/06/2005 10:34:34 AM PDT by calcowgirl
Ignoring a growing online protest by California consumers, the attorney general has awarded an $845,000 contract to data broker ChoicePoint Inc. to develop a computer system to track suspected criminals and terrorists.
The Department of General Services, ending a two-month delay, signed the deal with Atlanta-based ChoicePoint after it was approved by the Finance Department in late June, said Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer.
ChoicePoint won the state work despite being under investigation by both state and federal regulators for its handling of a major security breach.
After a competitive bidding process this spring, ChoicePoint emerged the winner to develop a new system for the attorney general called SPICES, an acronym for Single Point Information Collection and Evaluation System.
SPICES would allow state criminal intelligence analysts to quickly collect information about organized crime and terrorist suspects from disparate databases and analyze it more quickly than current technology allows.
The contract remained in limbo after ChoicePoint revealed in February that identity thieves posing as customers illegally accessed its databases and stole personal and financial information on 145,000 U.S. consumers, including 65,000 from California.
The breach went undetected for a year. ChoicePoint executives also sold company stock before disclosing the security breach but denied that officials delayed the announcement for improper reasons.
(snip)
A spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer tried to reassure taxpayers, saying that the system would be developed with dummy data and that ChoicePoint staff would not have access to confidential state databases.
California's decision to proceed with awarding the contract to ChoicePoint was the second bit of good news that the beleaguered data broker has received recently.
The Internal Revenue Service last week awarded the company a $20 million deal to help it process and receive data files.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
He's vey knowledgeable of what is legal and what shmells. :)
LOL. I'm glad you appreciate my selection of quotes. :-)
Don't ya feel safer knowing that uncle bill is watching out for ya?
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