No Place to Hide: Award-Winning Journalist Robert O'Harrow Goes Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Robert O'Harrow, author of No Place to Hide. Now let's talk about these government -- well, you call it the ‘security industrial complex.’ We are talking about Axiom, also Choicepoint, which people may know from the 2000 election, the ones who purged the voter database in Florida of what they said were felons; and, of course, many of them, of the people who should have been voting, were not felons. Choicepoint and these other companies like -- What is it, Seisint, Seismic Intelligence, Verint, Verifiable Intelligence?
ROBERT O'HARROW: Amazing stuff. I mean, these are public companies. You can go and look at their securities filings and read some of what they do. I did that intensively, and I went to these companies, and I looked at other records and lawsuits and all the stuff that I could get my hands on. And the portrait that emerges is that, in effect, what you have?And this is no exaggeration; it sounds a little goofy, but it's true, and I'll explain that in a minute. You have in effect the creation of private intelligence services that in many ways do what James Bond and his colleagues would have liked back in the 60's movies except they do it faster and better in terms of finding links among people, establishing patterns, you know, showing tendencies, risk assessment. Choicepoint, based outside of Atlanta, has collected -- has bought fifty-eight companies since 1997. They -- the companies include a genetic repository, biometrics, fingerprint; they are becoming a fingerprint specialist. They’ve got something like 19 billion records, and they have become, they say, the nation's largest background screener. So that when you try to get a job, there's a chance that the company is going to Choicepoint to check your background out. And so, if you had a – you know, if you wrote a bad check or if you had a bust for smoking pot when you were in college, or drunk driving or, you know, whatever, that kind of background is going to probably follow you forever now, and is going to be instantly available to anybody who’s willing to pay the $50 or $100 to check you out. And one fellow who's concerned about it called it that we're moving toward a “scarlet letter” society where you -- you are branded for life for whatever you did when you were 19 and foolish. But, more than that, Choicepoint is providing these intelligence services, and when I said I’d get back to it, it's this: I concluded in my book that Choicepoint was operating as a private intelligence service. And I was very excited in a sense and kind of awed by the idea of it. I took that to the company before I went to press with the book, and I said, ‘Here's what I’ve concluded you are and that you’re becoming;’ and the company said, ‘Well, yes, guess what? You're right.” And, so, using that, as well as more reporting, I wrote a story for the front page of the Washington Post basically declaring them a private intelligence service, and, you know, we'll see where that takes us. I think that's -- The idea of that, I'm hoping, will help people understand that we're not just dealing with a direct mailing list here anymore.
No Place to Hide: Award-Winning Journalist Robert O'Harrow Goes Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/1545230
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