Free Republic

Ignoring a growing online protest by California consumers, the attorney general has awarded an $845,000 contract to data broker ChoicePoint Inc. to develop a computer system to track suspected criminals and terrorists. The Department of General Services, ending a two-month delay, signed the deal with Atlanta-based ChoicePoint after it was approved by the Finance Department in late June, said Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer. ChoicePoint won the state work despite being under investigation by both state and federal regulators for its handling of a major security breach. After a competitive bidding process this spring, ChoicePoint emerged the winner to develop a...

It began in 1997 as a company that sold credit data to the insurance industry. But over the next seven years, as it acquired dozens of other companies, Alpharetta, Ga.-based ChoicePoint Inc. became an all-purpose commercial source of personal information about Americans, with billions of details about their homes, cars, relatives, criminal records and other aspects of their lives. As its dossier grew, so did the number of ChoicePoint's government and corporate clients, jumping from 1,000 to more than 50,000 today. Company stock once worth about $500 million ballooned to $4.1 billion.

The FBI and US consumer organisations have issued a warning about a growing fraud scheme involving emails that lure people to fake websites to collect sensitive personal or financial data. The scam involves email that links users to sites that are designed to look like legitimate sites and deceive consumers into revealing credit card or bank account numbers or other sensitive data. The scam, which has developed in the past few months, has tricked customers of big retailers such as Best Buy, the internet payment site Paypal and EarthLink, a major Internet service provider. Investigators term the fake websites "phisher"...

Everyone's favourite search engine now owns the world's most popular blogging tool. With its purchase of Pyra Labs, Google now runs Blogger and with it the weblogs of hundreds of thousands of opinionated net users. The story of the buyout was, appropriately enough, broken on a weblog by journalist Dan Gillmor, shortly followed by an 'official' announcement on his personal blog from Prya Labs co-founder Evan Williams. Then the blogs and technology news sites went wild, making this the net news story of the week, if not the month. Not journalism We should not get carried away by all this.Ridiculous...