Panic As Blast Destroys Venezuela Office Building Site of Negotiations *** CARACAS, Venezuela - A pre-dawn bomb blast ripped through the building where Venezuela's government and opposition have been negotiating a peace agreement, destroying three floors but injuring no one. The attack at about 2:45 a.m. Saturday came one day after the Organization of American States brokered a deal between the government and opposition to work toward a referendum on President Hugo Chavez's rule. Federal police chief Carlos Medina said the attack may have been politically motivated. An opposition negotiator said the blast was intended to intimidate his delegation at the talks, while the government blamed "coup-plotting" sectors of the opposition.
The explosion destroyed the first three floors of the Teleport building in central Caracas, shattering windows, destroying the entrance and twisting steel gates. Elevator cables hung from the facade and broken glass, roof tiles and light fixtures littered the ground. ***
U.S. buys information about Latin Americans *** 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. ***