Latin American fury as US buys information on millions
URL May 6 2003
Governments across Latin America have launched investigations after revelations that a United States firm is obtaining personal data about millions of citizens in the region and selling it to the US Government.
Documents show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $US11 million ($17.4 million) last year in return for its data, which includes Mexico's entire list of voters and Colombia's citizen identification database.
ChoicePoint literature advertising its services to the Department of Justice includes the promise of a "national registry file of all adult Colombians, including date and place of birth, gender, parentage, physical description, marital status . . . passport number, and registered profession".
It is illegal under Colombian law for government agencies to disclose such information, except in response to a request for data on a named individual.
A lawyer following the investigations described Mexican officials as incensed, and experts said the revelations threatened to destroy fragile public trust in electoral institutions.
In Nicaragua, police raided two firms believed to have provided the data, and the Costa Rican Government has also begun an inquiry.
Other countries involved include Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina and Venezuela.
ChoicePoint, based near Atlanta, is well known to observers of the Florida vote of 2000 that decided the US presidency in George Bush's favour.
The state hired its subsidiary Database Technologies to overhaul its electoral lists - and ended up wrongly disenfranchising thousands of voters, whose votes might have led to a different result.
Since the election and the September 11 terrorist attacks, ChoicePoint has been the beneficiary of a huge increase in the freedom government agencies have to gain access to personal data, through the USA Patriot Act.
Asked how the US Government was using the data, a spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs said it was helping to trace illegal immigrants but only if they were guilty of another crime.
Asked to confirm whether the data was used by his bureau only to pursue criminals, he said: "Mainly."
The Guardian