The Quiet Observer Choice Point Trajectory 1997-2008

The Quiet Observer Choice Point Trajectory 1997-2008

ChoicePoint is an American data brokerage company founded in 1997 as a spin-off from Equifax, a credit reporting company. The company collected a vast amount of information about individuals, including Social Security numbers, driver's licenses, address histories, and financial information, and provided it to a wide variety of fields, including insurance companies, marketing firms, and government agencies. Most notably, approximately 7,000 law enforcement agencies, including federal, state, and local governments, were among its clients, making ChoicePoint a de facto part of the national surveillance infrastructure.

In 2005, however, the company suffered a major data breach in which the personal information of approximately 163,000 individuals was fraudulently obtained, resulting in at least 800 cases of identity theft. The Federal Trade Commission took the situation very seriously and ordered the company to pay a $10 million fine and $5 million in consumer compensation. Another information breach incident recurred in 2008, and the company was fined an additional $275,000.

Despite these problems, ChoicePoint was acquired that year by information services giant Reed Elsevier for $4.1 billion and integrated into LexisNexis Risk Solutions. This merger brought ChoicePoint's vast data and surveillance capabilities into an enhanced form. As a harbinger of an era in which information and surveillance intersect, ChoicePoint's steps have quietly but surely changed the way society works.