March 16, 2005

More TennCare & Big Brother

This has to be comforting for the TennCare bureaucracy:

In Washington Tuesday, members of Congress grilled the head of an Atlanta data collection company accused of exposing 145,000 people to identity theft.

The head of ChoicePoint apologized to victims whose personal information, including social security numbers, was accessed by thieves. And now, it turns out there's a Tennessee connection, because that very same company has a contract with TennCare.

Beautiful.

More on ChoicePoint can be found here...a must read...especially for privacy advocates.

ChoicePoint is a private intelligence agency. Since 1997, ChoicePoint has bought 58 companies. As O’Harrow states in a recent interview (www.democracynow.org), these “include a genetic repository, biometrics, fingerprint, they are becoming a fingerprint specialist. They’ve got something like 19 billion records, and they have become, they say, the nation’s largest background screener. So that when you try to get a job, there’s a chance that the company is going to ChoicePoint to check your background out…. And one fellow who’s concerned about it called it that we’re moving toward a ‘scarlet letter’ society where you—you are branded for life for whatever you did when you were 19 and foolish.”

Recently, however, the company discovered that it had allowed criminals to access its database. Thieves gained access by using stolen identities to create seemingly legitimate businesses. They then formed 50 ChoicePoint accounts and were able to gain access to individuals’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers and credit reports. ChoicePoint stated that 144,778 people may have been affected by the security breach.

Technically, according to the Privacy Act passed by Congress in 1974, the government can't keep "databases" on citizens. However, ChoicePoint is a private company, and government agencies regularly use ChoicePoint's database of private data for their own means. Such as...Tennessee...

More from the WSMV story:

But TennCare isn't the only state agency doing business with ChoicePoint.

A no-bid contract with the state Health Department would pay ChoicePoint $60,000 for access to ChoicePoint's database of prescription patterns -- everything from how doctor's prescribe to records on specific drugs.

"We've heard from the Drug Enforcement Agency how it benefits them," said Judy Eads, the Assistant Commissioner for the Department of Health.

That's right...the government (both Federal and state) skirts the database provision in the Privacy Act by simply contracting it out to a private company.

Welcome to Oceania.

Comments:

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Would you or any of your readers happen to know if this is the same company that does fingerprinting/background checks for Tennessee's conceal carry permits?

Posted by: DocB at March 16, 2005 03:29 PM

Probably not, but I'll see if I can find out who that is contracted out to.

Posted by: Blake at March 16, 2005 03:39 PM

We already have a company like that in Nashville. It's called Background America on the corner of 19th and Church. They were bought out by Kroll, one of the most well-known intelligence and investigation companies in the world. They run the background checks, own LabCorp (the drug testing facilities), you name it. It's scary how they wield their power against private citizens. And they do.

You could get rejected for a job and never know why because of them reporting something they shouldn't have. Even a cursory search of the Kroll Group itself yields a colorful history of an organization that has a tendency to take matters into it's own hands.

Posted by: Interested_Party at March 19, 2005 12:04 PM