U.S. drug and
immigration probes suffer after vendor stops
selling Latin American citizen data
JIM KRANE
Associated Press
When Border Patrol agents came across the
corpses of 14 Mexican immigrants who died trying
to cross the searing Arizona desert in 2001, a
brand new tool helped U.S. authorities identify
the bodies and, eventually, the smugglers who
abandoned them.
The tool was a database containing the personal
information of 65 million voting-age Mexican
citizens. The U.S. government bought access to
it for $1 million a year from a giant data
vendor called ChoicePoint Inc. The company is
based in Alpharetta, Ga.
U.S. drug and immigration investigators prized
the data, according to the Department of
Homeland Security and other law enforcement
sources, because it gave them latitude to track
suspects inside Mexico without alerting local
authorities.
Now ChoicePoint's database is no longer
available to help U.S. authorities. An
Associated Press report detailing the U.S.
government's access to the data triggered a
public outcry in Mexico and other Latin American
countries from which ChoicePoint had obtained
citizens' private records.
After the Mexican government complained that its
federal voter rolls were the source, and were
likely obtained illegally by a Mexican company
that sold them to ChoicePoint, the suburban
Atlanta company cut off access to that
information.
In June, ChoicePoint wiped its hard drives of
Mexicans' home addresses, passport numbers and
even unlisted phone numbers. The company also
backed out of Costa Rica and Argentina.
ChoicePoint had been collecting personal
information on residents of 10 Latin American
countries - apparently without their consent or
knowledge - allowing three dozen U.S. agencies
to use it to track and arrest suspects inside
and outside the United States.
The revelations helped kindle privacy movements
in at least six countries where the company
operates. Government officials have ordered - or
threatened - inquiries into the data sales,
saying ChoicePoint and the U.S. government
violated national sovereignty.
"The federal registry is Mexican patrimony.
For a fistful of dollars this information goes
to the United States?" asked Julio Tellez
Valdes, a law professor and data protection
expert at the Monterrey Technical Institute in
Mexico. "Millions of Mexicans are now
conscious about the necessity of a data
protection law."
The raising of Mexican awareness about personal
privacy has not, however, been good for U.S.
investigations of drug and immigration smuggling
rings, U.S. law enforcers say. They consider
foreign data an increasingly potent
investigative tool, which can be used alongside
other databases to identify potential terrorists
or simply unmask fake identity documents.
In the deadly immigration case in Arizona,
ChoicePoint's tool did just that, helping
uncloak a smuggler masquerading as a surviving
immigrant, said a person familiar with that
investigation. He spoke on condition of
anonymity.
The ChoicePoint data allowed U.S. agents to run
their own investigations in Mexico, while
keeping Mexican police - who make the arrests -
in the dark until the last moment so corrupt
local authorities couldn't tip off suspects,
U.S. officials said.
"We didn't have to rely on the Mexicans to
provide us that information," said one
federal investigator who used the ChoicePoint
data, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"You run the risk of corruption when you
ask the Mexicans for something."
Now, Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration
and Customs Enforcement uses less efficient
tools, officials said.
"There's the yin and the yang for these
kinds of products," said ChoicePoint
marketing director James Lee. U.S. law enforcers
"love 'em but they never tell anybody
that."
One U.S. agent said he understood the Mexicans'
anger.
"I don't know that we'd like the Mexican
government having the same data on us,"
said Octavio Duarte, a special agent with the
Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in
Yuma, Ariz.
ChoicePoint also sells U.S. citizens' financial,
legal and personal details to the U.S.
government. Privacy advocates charge that the
government uses commercial data to skirt the
1974 Privacy Act, which prevents the government
from compiling the files itself.
Federal anti-terrorism projects - including the
Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness
program - are designed to plumb databases of
Americans' financial and legal records for clues
to suspicious behavior. News organizations,
including the AP, use ChoicePoint's data for
researching stories.
While ChoicePoint's sales of Americans' files
remain strong, the outcry in Mexico appears to
have torpedoed the company's largest foreign
business.
Former employee John Jordan, 41, of
Jacksonville, Fla., said ChoicePoint's Latin
American business was on "life
support" in June when the company laid him
off and deleted its Mexican data. Jordan, a data
analyst, said the Mexican files attracted about
two-thirds of ChoicePoint's international sales.
Lee characterized ChoicePoint's foray into Latin
America as an experiment, saying the data vendor
collected less than $1 million of its $792
million in 2002 revenue from selling foreigners'
personal information.
"It's so small, it has no impact on our
earnings," he said.
Lee said ChoicePoint's business is unaffected in
seven of the 10 Latin American countries where
it still deals in data. And the company still
sells driver's license data on 6 million
residents of Mexico City.
Mexican authorities have launched an official
probe into the data sales to ChoicePoint, as
have those in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and
Costa Rica. In Mexico, federal investigators
issued an arrest warrant for a fugitive believed
to have sold the federal election records to a
Mexican data firm, which resold the database to
ChoicePoint.
In May, Mexican investigators asked ChoicePoint
to send representatives to Mexico City, but the
company refused, fearing that its employees
would be arrested, Jordan said. Instead,
ChoicePoint persuaded Mexican officials to come
to the Mexican consulate in Atlanta, where the
company handed over the electoral data.
In Colombia, the attorney general's office said
it is trying to determine who copied and sold
the data. The country's human rights ombudsman,
Eduardo Cifuentes, introduced a privacy bill in
Colombia's congress this month that aims to
prevent the "merchandising" of
citizens' personal information.
None of the countries' officials - other than
Mexico's - have contacted ChoicePoint, Lee said.
Tellez, the Mexican data protection expert, said
he believed Mexico's congress would propose
privacy legislation when it returns in
September. The ChoicePoint scandal broke during
the deeply unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq,
which soured already mistrustful Mexicans on the
motives of the United States.
Financial analysts say the revelations inflicted
only public relations damage on ChoicePoint,
especially south of the Rio Grande. The furor in
Latin America had no discernible effect on the
data vendor's stock, which has benefited from
Washington's growing appetite for personal
information and background checks, analysts say.
Still, vendors of personal data like ChoicePoint
and LexisNexis operate at the mercy of privacy
legislation, including measures being discussed
in the United States.
If other countries tighten privacy laws,
ChoicePoint will have to stop offering data on
their citizens, said Andrew Jeffrey, an analyst
at Needham and Co.
"If the risks outweigh the
profitability," he said, "they'll exit
that business."
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