I’m going to start following the story of the Choicepoint company. Choicepoint is a company that maintains data records on EVERYBODY, and has government contracts and private industry contracts to USE that information.

Choicepoint was in the news recently because a group of con men scammed Choicepoint into relesing about a hundred thousand records, including social security numbers.

In the excerpt below, a reporter connects Choicepoint to the Florida election for president in 2000, accusing choicepoint and the Republican Katherine Harris of disenfranchising thousands of voters unfairly.

See also this DailyKOS thread about Choicepoint and the Florida elections

CHOICEPOINT: The REAL Big Brother (watch for more to come)

Don’t look at the flash!
Ground Zero as Profit Center
As the towers fell, ChoicePoint’s stock rose; and from Ground Zero, contracts gushed forth from War on Terror fever. Why? Because this outfit is holding no less 16 billion records on every living and dying being in the USA. They’re the Little Brother with the filing system when Big Brother calls.

ChoicePoint’s quick route to no-bid spy contracts was not impeded by the fact that the company did something for George W. Bush that the voters would not: select him as our president.

Here’s how they did it. Before the 2000 election, ChoicePoint unit Database Technologies, held a $4 million no-bid contract under the control of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, to identify felons who had illegally registered to vote. The ChoicePoint outfit altogether fingered 94,000 Florida residents. As it turned out, less than 3,000 had a verifiable criminal record; almost everyone on the list had the right to vote.

The tens of thousands of “purged” citizens had something in common besides their innocence: The list was, in the majority, made up of African Americans and Hispanics, overwhelmingly Democratic voters whose only crime was V.W.B: Voting While Black. And that little ethnic cleansing operation, conducted by Governor Jeb Bush’s gang with ChoicePoint’s aid, determined the race in which Harris named Bush the winner by 537 votes.