Questions on Latin American citizen data sold to U.S. government

By Jim Krane ASSOCIATED PRESS 12:44 p.m., April 13, 2003

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, says 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. But it refuses to name the sellers or say where those parties obtained the data.

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 appear to 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.

If ChoicePoint can sell foreigners' details to Washington, it is also in the position to sell data on U.S. citizens to foreign governments. It won't, for policy reasons.

"We don't think it's the right thing to do, so we're not doing it," Lee said.

In Mexico, ChoicePoint says it buys driving records of 6 million Mexico City residents and the country's entire 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 and marketing companies like Reader's Digest and American Express.

Tellez predicted that lobbying pressure would weaken the bill.

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, he said.

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, he said.

Another obstacle is primitive record-keeping by governments, like those in the Middle East that still use paper, or where records are kept in non-Roman script like Arabic or Japanese, Lee said.

At U.S. agencies with access to ChoicePoint's Latin American data, officials often said they didn't know how it was used. The Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, for example, declined to respond to repeated Associated Press requests for information on the Border Patrol's use of the data.

The Justice Department's $67 million four-year contract with ChoicePoint's is the largest among federal agencies. But most of that is spent by agencies looking up U.S. records – like credit and crime histories – not data from foreign governments.

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.

An agency official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the files were used by its investigators and Quick Response Teams to round up undocumented immigrants in non-border areas of the United States.

Although officials at the agency – now reorganized into the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – won't say what effect the ChoicePoint data had on those investigations, figures show officers arrested 80,000 immigrants in that period.

"It's a force multiplier," the official said of the data.

Broad government contracts for ChoicePoint's Latin American data would also make the information available to federal drug agents working in Colombia, Mexico and elsewhere, along with U.S. personnel in overseas embassies and consulates.

U.S. intelligence agencies also have access, under ChoicePoint deals with the departments of Justice, Treasury, State and Energy.

Increased use of the foreign data, coupled with new rules giving immigration inspectors wide leeway to decide whether or not to allow a traveler to enter the country, could mean more Latin Americans will be blocked from the United States.

Immigrant advocates say this could eventually hurt economies dependent on money sent home by Latins working in the United States.

"These will be people who have visas to come here, but based on some information that's in the possession of the U.S. government, they're simply turned back without a hearing," said Joan Friedland, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center in Washington D.C.

"It's the worst of all possible worlds. It weeds out the people who should be allowed to come here and doesn't do anything to weed out those who shouldn't."

AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft and AP correspondents Traci Carl in Mexico City and Vanessa Arrington in Bogota contributed to this report

On the Net: www.choicepoint.com www.epic.org www.privacyjournal.net