Who Got Hacked?

I saw an article in the Washington Post on a company that notified CA citizens that their personal information had been accessed illegally by hackers. The company, ChoicePoint, says that they have no evidence that data for citizens of other states has been compromised. Security experts scoffed at the idea that hackers would limit themselves to regional data.

I clicked over to the story because I used to live in CA and wanted to see who the company was, to try and figure out if my own data might have been stolen. But the really interesting thing is that ChoicePoint sounded really familiar. Bloggingly familiar. And  they should be.

In this January post, I wrote about the federal government's use of ChoicePoint to collect information on US citizens that the government is barred by law from collecting. So they outsource it.

"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."

This is the company that got hacked. So the real story here is that the US government's outsource provider of personal information on US citizens got hacked.

UPDATE: For comprehensive info on ChoicePoint, head over to this well sourced post at Public Domain Progress.

Comments

[tas]

ChoicePoint is also the company that helped rig the 2000 election. they were hired by Florida to do he infamous scrub off their voter rolls that just happened to take a bunch of Gore voters off the list, even though they had never committed a felony.

And, on the outsourcing bit, one has to wonder just how much our government does outsource tasks to rivate corporations. Some intelligence officials have said that Booze Allen Hamilton is practically as powerful as the CIA since the CIA outsources so much work to them.