SFGate.com: Stifling Dissent

"A man could get cynical..."

Harley Sorensen's column has been dropped by SFGate.com. Read his last column - Wead Whacking And Gannon Fodder - and you will understand why he was dropped - by daring to suggest what others think but are too afraid to say.

The guts of his piece is this:

Finally, we have the truly frightening case of ChoicePoint, the Georgia-based personal information provider which has learned how to get away with murder, figuratively speaking.

ChoicePoint came to national attention, or inattention, following the 2000 elections, when it was learned that it was the firm hired by Florida to identify convicted felons on its voting rolls.

The firm made approximately 8,000 "mistakes" while carrying out its task. It identified completely innocent people as convicted felons, with the result that those people were denied their right to vote. Most were black or Hispanic. In that election, about 90 percent of black/Hispanic votes voted for Al Gore. So it is safe to conclude that had the rejected voters been allowed to vote, Al Gore would have carried Florida and become our 43rd president.

ChoicePoint made the news again recently when it was belatedly revealed that it had provided confidential personal information on 145,000 U.S. residents to identity thieves posing as legitimate business people. So far, according to an NPR report last week, 750 of those people have been victimized by the thieves.

How did ChoicePoint react to their damaging mistake? Well, at first it did nothing, claiming later that it did not want to interfere with a criminal investigation. The, when pushed, it sent out letters to the 145,000 victims, telling them they were at risk.

That's it. Letters. Just letters telling the victims that they'd been had and they'd better do something to protect themselves.

Here's the part that gets me. ChoicePoint is supposed to be the nation's top expert on personal information, so how is it that it cheerfully provides such information to a bogus company? Isn't the whole point of a company like ChoicePoint to protect others from being cheated by cheats? If it can't protect itself, why should others expect it to protect them?

The latest ChoicePoint fiasco cries out for investigation. Are there only 145,000 victims, or are there many more? Do all the victims belong to the same political party by any chance? What price will ChoicePoint be asked to pay for the massive damage its apparent negligence has caused?

A cynic would say there's more to ChoicePoint than meets the eye. It's a company that rose from nothing to multibillion-dollar status in a very short time. Its known mistakes are horrendous.

Is ChoicePoint tied in with the Bush administration in some way? Not that I know of. But I'm betting the Bushies have warm, fuzzy feelings about ChoicePoint, and it's not going to be held accountable.

Let sfgate.com know how you feel about dropping such a courageous columnist.