The limits just keep on coming

I referred this past Sunday to the outrage involving ChoicePoint, a data pimp that admitted that 50 fraudulent accounts had been used to obtain personal information on almost 145,000 people. The Wall Street Journal for March 4 has some revealing information about the lobbying undertaken by ChoicePoint and others in the industry to prevent any oversight of their obviously slipshod operations. (A paid subscription is required to get the article through the WSJ's website, but AOL members can access it here.)

ChoicePoint and others that sell personal data have aggressively - and successfully - fought legislation that might prevent unauthorized disclosures or give additional rights to consumers harmed by incorrect information....

These data sellers have deployed a deft combination of lobbying and industry-affiliated think tanks to head off increased oversight. ChoicePoint and six of the country's other largest sellers of private consumer data spent at least $2.4 million last year to lobby members of Congress and a variety of federal agencies, according to disclosure forms filed with the U.S. House and Senate. ChoicePoint was the biggest spender, with $970,000 either paid to outside lobbyists or spent directly by the company.

Among their successes was the 1999 blocking of a proposed provision of federal law that would have required brokers to seek permission of consumers to use private information about them, that is, consumers would have to "opt in" to the system. What was gained instead was a limited ability to "opt out," and even at that most consumers don't know the possibility exists - and those who do usually don't know how to go about it. And the companies sure as hell aren't going to volunteer the information. Another victory came just last year when a bill to restrict the ability of the data pimps to sell information containing Social Security numbers was defeated.

The excuses and justifications are so painfully familiar: Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University and a paid whore of the data pimps, said

in an interview that even if such laws were enacted, private data will still become available one way or another. "There's always going to be some way for people to steal records," Mr. Cate says.

Okay, then, if the logic is that no matter what the law says someone will find a way to evade it or break it, can you cite me a law that should not be nullified, done away with, as a waste of time? Does Mr. Cate leave his house, his car, his office, unlocked because there will always be some way for someone to get around the locks or just break in? The fact that a law may be unable to eliminate a risk is hardly cause to not even try.

But there's another point in Cate's "logic" that needs to be addressed, one expressed more plainly by the data pimps themselves.

ChoicePoint ... said in a statement that it supports a national dialogue on how public-records information is used and by whom. "We support increased penalties for the intentional misuse of personal information. We look forward to a discussion about how and when consumers are notified about misuse of their personal data," it said. ...

The companies and their supporters say that rather than regulating them, legislators should focus on those committing the crimes by increasing penalties and improving ways to catch such data thieves.

"Leave us alone! It's nothing to do with us! All we do is sell the guns and ammo at gun shows without even background checks! All we do is make it as easy as possible for crooks, criminals, and nutcases to get all the guns they want! It's not our fault if they 'misuse' them!"

"Leave us alone! It's nothing to do with us! All we do is sell the booze to the people in the bar! So what if they're obviously drunk already? So what it they get into their car and smash someone up on the highway? It's not our fault if they 'misuse' their liquor!"

"Yeah, right! Leave us alone! It's nothing to do with us! All we do is gather the data, mass it all in one place, sell it to pretty much anyone who asks, make it ridiculously easy for thieves to steal your identity, your life, your reputation. It's not our fault if they 'misuse' that information!"

In fact, they're actually claiming they have no responsibilities at all: Note first the use of the phrase "intentional misuse" - apparently manslaughter and reckless endangerment are more pointless, useless laws along with those about defective products because after all, the manufacturers didn't intend to injure consumers. And note next that they still want to "dialogue" on "how and when" consumers are notified" about "misuse" of their personal data. That is, the industry won't even commit to notifying you if it knows your data has been compromised. Remember that the ChoicePoint scandal only came to light because of a California law that required them to notify their California-based customers. (California is the only state with such a law.)

And not only that, the industry even denies that it has any responsibility to correct information in its databases that can be shown to be false. The WSJ story actually starts with the tale of Carlos Ramirez, fired in 2002 after a background check showed he had pleaded guilty to a drug charge seven years earlier.

But Mr. Ramirez had been the victim of identity theft; the real perpetrator of the felony had appropriated his name and personal information. Mr. Ramirez sent his fingerprints to the provider of the background-check data, ChoicePoint Inc. He even figured out he was four inches taller than the actual criminal and had different colored eyes.

According to a lawsuit Mr. Ramirez filed against the company, ChoicePoint refused to change the data. "It's your life and you have to fix it," Mr. Ramirez claimed a ChoicePoint employee told him. The company disputed his claims and argued it wasn't responsible for mistakes based on publicly available government records.

Not responsible, again, ever after being shown the data was wrong. "Nothing to do with us. Not our problem. TS, Mac."

You would think that such outrageous behavior would be enough to prompt action and indeed the public appears to be strongly in favor. But the Journal notes one reason, one important reason, that Congress may be reluctant to act: In the wake of earlier scandals involving revelations that the government was maintaining files - in effect, spying - on millions of Americans, restrictions were placed on the legal authority of government agencies to maintain such files. So nowadays, the government obeys the law and just buys the information from our "veritable privately run domestic intelligence agencies" - the data pimps.

Apparently, it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it. For a nice fat profit, too.