Well professor,
One look at the "Yes Minister" DVD's sold by the BBC's (the British Broadcasting Corporation) online shop will convince you that official secrecy is even more pernicious. [Watching the series is great fun as well as instructive and, also, brings up fond memories of undergraduate studies in pre- and early Thatcher Britain]. After all, we get to know that ChoicePoint is acting badly in this one. How likely would it be for us to know, if the data had been stolen from a government data depository instead ?

ChoicePoint...wasn't that the company chosen by the Bush crime family in Florida to provide the wildly incorrect list of purged voters to the Sec State?

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670032646/qid=1108579630/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-6522537-5092120

Thanks for reminding me how much I miss my home state.

A few years ago, I created a generic set of documents for opting out of a wide variety of data sharing services. You can find info on it at the bottom of my home page. While it won't necessarily completely remove you from everybody's DBs, it at least registers your request that they not propagate stuff further, which helps some. Of course, this is assuming that they have not, since I made it, changed the addresses to which stuff is supposed to be sent. :-P

Oh, sorry, forgot that links don't post. "http://www.auros.org/" is my homepage. (I link my name to my journal.)

Choicepoint isn't a credit reporting agency/credit bureau. They might have lots of data on folks, but they can't maintain a database of detailed financial data on folks without incurring the legal obligations of a credit bureau, something they would be loth to do (the big three bureaus are TransUnion, Equifax, and Experian.)

I live in CAL. I did not know our state laws required notification. Thanks for letting me know that Sacramento got at least this one right.

Dan: Whatever they call themselves, they do have a system by which you can opt out, and the form-letter for it (which was current as of Jan '03) is included in my template.

The prof. points out what I find the major weakness of conservative ideology. The market does not solve everything. Corporations are operating to make money. If they can't make money doing it, it won't be done. Corporations tend to focus on short-term (quarter to quarter) gain, and not long term gain. The private sector can be very good, but it works best by selecting subsets (the richest, the healthiest, etc.) This is clearly the case in health insurance and schooling. Whenever something becomes universal, it is very difficult to make money on it.

A spokesman on NPR this afternoon said they would notify the other 100,000 people effected in addition to the California people. He estimated 145,000 total. They should have used some of the $2 million they were paid by Fla. to scrub voter rolls in 2000 to upgrade their security.

Did anyone notice that the NPR reporter just quoted the Choicepoint spokesman that due to "technical difficulties" they had only been able to find the California people at first, but now that those "difficulties" had been worked out they were going to be able to inform anyone.

The NPR reporter let this go without comment.

Does anyone seriously believe that story? California was the only state they were obligated to report and magically it was also the only state they could immediately determine was hacked? NPR needed to be WAY more aggressive on that. It was obviosly public pressure that led to the full disclosure.

I'm sure the Federal Government has taken notice of this problem and will soon act to rectify it. In the great tradition of this Administration as exemplified by the "Canned Spam" bill(ineffective Federal law which gutted the effective CA law) you can expect to see passed a law that will preempt the California law requiring disclosure with much weaker legislation that does not. That way no citizen will ever have to be frightened again by getting a letter in the mail informing them of the possibility of their being a victim of identity theft.