Mexican Data Grab

US intelligence tentacles 
  
from www.informationclearinghouse.info

Mexican Data Grab

By John Ross 

August 13, 2003 (The Progressive) Since the terror attacks on New
York and Washington, the U.S. Justice Department has gotten access to
the personal records of more than 300 million Latin Americans,
including the citizens of its two most populous nations, Brazil and
Mexico, in addition to Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras,
Nicaragua, and Guatemala.

The U.S. information grab has not been a big hit in Latin America. In
Mexico, it has triggered political shock waves. "Alarm over sale of
millions of Mexicans' records," headlined Reforma, the rightwing
daily that broke the story of how U.S. info giant ChoicePoint
acquired the data. "Attack on national sovereignty," editorialized
its leftwing rival, La Jornada, "Mid-term elections threatened."

Under an agreement signed in September 2001 with the U.S. Justice
Department, ChoicePoint, the Atlanta information entity that was
implicated in the 2000 elections shenanigans, provided Washington
with dubiously acquired Mexican data, Reforma reported. Attorney
General John Ashcroft received access to updated Mexican voter
registration lists containing personal information on sixty-five
million citizens, Mexico City drivers' license records dating back to
1997 and updated each month, and all automobile registration data
collected in the capital during that same period.

The political scandal exploded just two months before a make-or-break
midterm election for President Vicente Fox's rightwing National
Action Party (PAN) and has spawned an investigation by Ashcroft's
counterpart, Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha. Whereas in
the United States, such public records are fair game for direct mail
advertisers, telemarketers, political candidates, and other annoying
hucksters, in Mexico their confidentiality is closely guarded. Their
sale to ChoicePoint – and ultimately the U.S. government – has raised
issues of national security and sovereignty.

"I didn't register to vote so that the government could sell my name
to the gringos," fumes barber Lalo Miranda, snipping hair in his
downtown Mexico City market stall. Miranda grew curious about the
sale of his name and address when he began to receive unsolicited
junk mail – in English. "I don't even speak English," he snorts.

The scandal has been made even more conspicuous by ChoicePoint's
refusal to divulge from whom or how it obtained the databases, citing
confidentiality clauses in the purchase contracts. According to
preliminary findings by Macedo's electoral crimes prosecutor Maria de
los Angeles Fromow, ChoicePoint bought voting lists from a Mexican
database for $250,000 two years ago. When the scandal broke, the
Atlanta corporation agreed not to offer the lists for commercial sale
while the legality of the information transfer is under
investigation, confirms ChoicePoint spokesperson Chuck Jones.

But the brouhaha over the Mexican records goes far beyond junk mail
and nuisance phone calls. Voter registration and drivers' license
databases are prime law enforcement tools to track suspects and
fugitives. And ChoicePoint's leasing of access to this information to
the Department of Homeland Security's Quick Response Team worries not
a few Mexicans that Big Brother is beaming in from Washington.

Reforma speculated that the data could be used to expand watch lists
of undesirable foreigners at all U.S. points of entry as mandated by
the Secure Borders Act of 2002. La Jornada Washington correspondent
Jim Cason was alarmed that the Mexican data bases could be
incorporated into the Terrorism Information Awareness operation being
run out of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) by Retired Admiral John Poindexter, convicted of five felony
counts of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandals.
Poindexter's project would incorporate all public and private
databases to develop profiles of potential terrorists. In a half
dozen years of doing business, ChoicePoint has become the largest
purveyor of public records to U.S. law enforcement and other
investigative agencies, claiming that it can supply "10,000,000,000
records on individuals and companies." "Whether you are looking for a
fugitive or tracking their assets, we provide mission-critical
information with a flick of the finger," ChoicePoint's flag-bedecked
web page brags. "We get you the info you need now." (That slogan is
trademarked, by the way.)

ChoicePoint's accelerated growth from a spin-off of a credit check
agency in 1997 into an info industry giant closely parallels the rise
of George W. Bush.

In 1999, First Sibling Jeb Bush and Florida Secretary of State
Katherine Harris paid ChoicePoint subsidiary DBT $3.8 million to tidy
up the state's voter registration lists by eliminating allegedly
ineligible electors. In the process, it knocked off 57,600 mostly
black and Latino voters, most of them Democrats, a ploy that ensured
Jeb's brother the Presidency.

According to documentation unearthed under the Freedom of Information
Act by the independent Electronic Privacy Information Center,
ChoicePoint representatives were on the scene at the World Trade
Center tragedy in Guinness-Book-of-World-Records-ambulance-chasing
time. The company won contracts September 12 to match victims with
its growing DNA data bank.

Two weeks later, ChoicePoint, one of the six largest information
brokers in the United States, signed a $67 million contract (another
$11 million would be attached later) to provide Ashcroft with the
personal records of hundreds of millions of Latin Americans, all
presumably potential terrorist suspects.

The handing over of Mexican voter registration records was a serious
embarrassment to President Vicente Fox's assertion that his country's
electoral system is at last free of the fraud that kept one party in
power for seven decades. The voting credential issued by the Federal
Electoral Institute (IFE), whose legitimacy is undermined by the
scandal, contains a digitized photo and thumb print and is essential
I.D. here for everything from cashing a check to entering a public
building.

While only the names, addresses, birthplaces, and birthdates of
voters are thought to be included in the voting data obtained by
ChoicePoint, drivers' license records contain home telephone numbers
for six million Mexicans. The vehicle registration lists, which
indicate motor serial numbers, are thought to have been taken from
Mexico's now-defunct National Automobile Registry, whose director,
Ricardo Cavallo, was extradited to Spain, where Judge Baltazar Garzon
has pledged to try him for genocide during Argentina's dirty war.
Cavallo may have learned the tricks of the document-stealing trade
while allegedly processing the confiscated property of suspected
leftists held at a Buenos Aires naval training school where 5,000 are
thought to have been tortured and killed by the Argentine military.

ChoicePoint's ease in obtaining sensitive Mexican public records has
occasioned a flurry of fingerpointing. Some 4,000 underpaid IFE
officials in thirty-two states had access to the voter registration
lists that were contained on a series of easily copied CDs. In
addition, the political parties, whose venality is legendary, all had
access to the discs. In fact, the Mexico City drivers' license data
dates back to 1997, when the left-center Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD) took control of the capital. The updating of the
data on a monthly and yearly basis suggested ongoing involvement with
ChoicePoint by someone with access to the files.

The scandal tarnished Mexico's political system. "Do you think I'm
going to vote after all this?" Miranda asks a U.S. reporter. "They
would probably pick my pocket while I was marking the ballot."

What is to be done? National Autonomous University law professor
Jorge Camil suggests a class action lawsuit by sixty-five million
affected Mexicans. "But the U.S. courts do not listen to Mexico," he
adds ruefully.

The prospect of the U.S. Border Patrol or its bounty hunters kicking
down doors in Mexico City looking for a Los Angeles bail skip or New
York parking scofflaw was no longer just a paranoid's vision, says
Monterrey Technological Institute professor Julio Tello, who helped
write Mexico's protocols on the use of databases. Neither was a phone
tap ordered by U.S. Homeland Security. In the new New World Order,
borders no longer guarantee privacy. "This is a violation of personal
privacy and political rights," says Tello. "Now it is not just the
telemarketers. The FBI has your number, too."

But not any longer. This story has a happy ending. Because of the
outcry in Mexico, ChoicePoint "has scrapped its practice of obtaining
and selling personal information on Mexican citizens," The Wall
Street Journal reported in June. "ChoicePoint spokesman Chuck Jones
said . . . that the company agreed last month to stop buying and
selling the Mexican data because a government inquiry there
determined that it was confidential. He said the data would be
returned and purged from the ChoicePoint system. U.S. agencies will
no longer have access to it."

Reached by The Progressive, Jones says, "We are still interested in
obtaining this data but only with the cooperation of Mexican
authorities." Jones insists the company obtained the data legally.

Meanwhile, other countries in Latin America are not panning out for
ChoicePoint. "We just dropped Argentina because there was no market
for it," Jones says. And Costa Rica recently changed its law to make
the data confidential.

Reached at his barbershop stall in the Pino Suarez market, Lalo
Miranda was incredulous at the news that ChoicePoint had returned the
Mexican lists. Said Miranda: "Listen, once they have your name, they
have it forever."

John Ross is a longtime Mexico hand and the author of "The War
Against Oblivion," a chronicle of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas.

Copyright: The Progressive