] Are you a little queasy about unwittingly revealing your
] life's most minute details to a company that sells them
] to big business and the government? No worries, says
] ChoicePoint. Privacy, as we once knew it, is a thing of
] the past.

It's pretty damn long article, but important...

] "We are beginning to see a shift in the traditional
] privacy debate from simply focusing on an individual's
] right to privacy, to also including consideration of
] society's right to protect itself," says a letter from
] ChoicePoint CEO Derek Smith in the company's most recent
] annual report. "ChoicePoint as a company and I as an
] individual continue to believe, however, that in a free
] society -- particularly in today's society -- we do not
] always have the right to anonymity."

This is a loaded perspective coming from someone who has a financial interest in the erosion of privacy. (I'm reminded of Scott McNealy's comment that privacy is dead. Easy for you to say asshole, the computers you sell are being used to kill it!)

As you read into this article it just gets worse. Their next trick is to claim that they "self regulate" access to this information better then the government would. If Mr. Lee really believes this then he doesn't have a basic understanding of economics. The money that the feds pay you to do a search would be reflected in the overall costs of running their own system anyway, so no, you aren't prohibiting access in any way. PR at its best. Say something simple, and wrong, which requires a complex response. Simple beats correct in public debate every time.

Then you find out about a large number of black people who were excluded from the 2000 election in Florida...

The fact is that we are building extremely effective systems for fine grained social control. They are coming out of the wood work at every level. We are using the 911 attacks to justify actions we considered reprehensible in the wake of the 1993 WTC bombing (proving that emotions are more significant then needs here), without any clear relationship between the absence of these technologies and the success of these attack (anything could have been helpful).

The fact is that these systems are already being abused.

The fact is that there will be more successful attacks against us, and that we will further use those attacks to justify more technologies of social control. Eventually those in our society who desire to control us will finally have the means at their disposal, and they will take upon those means to enslave us.

I hope this country has the god damn spine to stand up to these fuckers when they arrive. If not, the next terrorist attacks will be our Reichstag fire.

] "We are beginning to see a shift in the traditional
] privacy debate from simply focusing on an individual's
] right to privacy, to also including consideration of
] society's right to protect itself," says a letter from
] ChoicePoint CEO Derek Smith in the company's most recent
] annual report. "ChoicePoint as a company and I as an
] individual continue to believe, however, that in a free
] society -- particularly in today's society -- we do not
] always have the right to anonymity."

ChoicePoint brings new meaning to the slogan, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale."