Have something to say to the WP re Internet privacy? Here's your

[leveymg]

chance. WashPost discussion forum scheduled for 11am:

http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/04/tech_oharrow_012105.htm

Background articles:

1)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22269-2005Jan19.html

In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth Of Personal Data
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page A01
It began in 1997 as a company that sold credit data to the insurance industry. But over the next seven years, as it acquired dozens of other companies, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. became an all-purpose commercial source of personal information about Americans, with billions of details about their homes, cars, relatives, criminal records and other aspects of their lives.
As its dossier grew, so did the number of ChoicePoint's government and corporate clients, jumping from 1,000 to more than 50,000 today. Company stock once worth about $500 million ballooned to $4.1 billion.
Now the little-known information industry giant is transforming itself into a private intelligence service for national security and law enforcement tasks. It is snapping up a host of companies, some of them in the Washington area, that produce sophisticated computer tools for analyzing and sharing records in ChoicePoint's immense storehouses. In financial papers, the company itself says it provides "actionable intelligence."

<snip>

ChoicePoint and other private companies increasingly occupy a special place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts, in part because they can compile information and use it in ways government officials sometimes cannot because of privacy and information laws.
ChoicePoint renewed and expanded a contract with the Justice Department in the fall of 2001. Since then, the company and one of its leading competitors, LexisNexis Group, have also signed contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide public records online, according to newly released documents.



2)
http://www.noplacetohide.net/asher.html
Hank Asher


Hank Asher
Hank Asher has been a leading figure in the data industry since the early 1990s. After 9/11, he invented a data-searching product called "Matrix," which gives investigators nearly instant access to a rich dossier on virtually any adult in America. Matrix earned Asher a 2003 meeting at the White House with Vice President Cheney, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
Asher founded Database Technologies (DBT) in 1992. After selling that company, he launched a new company, Seisint, in 1998.
________________________________________
Robert O'Harrow: So, what happened? Where were you on September 11th, 2001?
Hank Asher: I happened to be in my office. I was mostly fishing. I enjoy sport fishing. I enjoy going out. We go out for a week and we might not see a boat for a whole week. We go to very remote areas that are not traveled by tourists, or the fishing tournaments, or anything like that. We go out to relax, to see God's world in its untouched way, and it greatly relaxes me.
O'Harrow: So you'd been doing a lot of that, but that particular day, you happened to be at your office.
Asher: I was. And a guy called me on the phone and said, "You won't believe what happened." So I turned on my TV, and about 40 people came into my office and we all stood there and watched the second plane crash into the building. I instructed every salesperson and every employee in the company to start calling law enforcement, and telling them that they had unlimited, free access to Accurint to investigate what was going on.
We went to work doing that. We continued, then, all of September 12 and all of September 13. September 13 was a Thursday, and I was standing six feet behind you at that countertop right there doing the same thing that most Americans were doing: I was drinking. I had a martini in a glass that really was probably 6.25 martinis, and I drank it. And I was standing next to a good friend of mine for over 20 years, who's a retired law enforcement officer that now works at Accurint - at Seisint, rather.
And I said, "Bill, I know how to find these guys." And so, Bob, us 50-year-old guys were running across my house into my bedroom, which is about a 100-foot run, like we're children. And within 30 seconds, I had 32,000 people up of interest.
O'Harrow: Now, did the idea come to you just then. I mean, had it been bubbling, and it just came to you? What happened?
Asher: I had written a program, previously, to determine people's wealth that very much looked at a lot of the characteristics. The logic was very similar, and I realized that I had a model already developed that could be written a different way to look for this particular type of person.
At noon the next day, which was September - Friday, September 14, that night about midnight, I called Tim Moore and said, "Tim, I think, if you can put together the right team of government officials and directors of departments, that we can catch these guys. We can find these guys."
O'Harrow: Now, which guys are you talking about?
Asher: Terrorists.
O'Harrow: Obviously, not the ones who are dead. You were talking about their colleagues and people who -
Asher: Sure.
O'Harrow: So, you called him at midnight.
Asher: And, FDLE started manning - They furnished and manned a secure facility that my scientists and my technologists and my programmers and I, ultimately, worked for the next two years, and are still working.
O'Harrow: How soon did that facility get up and running?
Asher: The FDLE guys showed up at about 9:00 in the morning, and the secure facility was built by Monday morning, from scratch, with computers on about 20 desks and a conference room tied into our supercomputers and the logic that we had developed.
Back to No Place to Hide

3)

http://www1.seisint.com/aboutus/


What We Do
Seisint provides information products that allow organizations to quickly and easily extract valuable knowledge from huge amounts of data. These innovative products are made possible by integrating the Seisint Data Supercomputer™ technology, tens of billions of data records on individuals and businesses, and patent-pending data linking methods.

Seisint's products are aimed at critical areas such as:
• Debt Recovery
• Due Diligence
• Fraud Detection
• Identity Verification
• Law Enforcement
• Legal Investigations
• Pre-Employment Screening
• Resident Screening
• Data Supercomputing

Seisint was founded in 1998 and has grown to employ over 300 people at its locations in Boca Raton, Florida; Orlando, Florida; Reston, Virginia; and London, UK.

[ooglymoogly]

1. 1984 here we come.... back to the future eom

[leveymg]

2. It's not as if we weren't warned 55 years ago. This should be no surprise

to the willful idiots at the WashPost and other "liberal" institutions in Washington.