[IP] washingtonpost.com: Bahamas Firm Screens Personal Data To Assess Risk
washingtonpost.com
Bahamas Firm Screens Personal Data To Assess Risk
Operation Avoids U.S. Privacy Rules
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 16, 2004; Page A01
It began as one of the Bush administration's most ambitious homeland
security efforts, a passenger screening program designed to use
commercial records, terrorist watch lists and computer software to
assess millions of travelers and target those who might pose a threat.
The system has cost almost $100 million. But it has not been turned on
because it sparked protests from lawmakers and civil liberties
advocates, who said it intruded too deeply into the lives of ordinary
Americans. The Bush administration put off testing until after the
election.
Now the choreographer of that program, a former intelligence official
named Ben H. Bell III, is taking his ideas to a private company
offshore, where he and his colleagues plan to use some of the same
concepts, technology and contractors to assess people for risk, outside
the reach of U.S. regulators, according to documents and interviews.
Bell's new employer, the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd.,
intends to amass large databases of international records and analyze
them in the coming years for corporations, government agencies and
other information services. One of the first customers is information
giant LexisNexis Group, one of the main contractors on the government
system that was known until recently as the second generation of the
Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening Program, or CAPPS II. The
program is now known as Secure Flight.
The company plans to do such things as assess foreign job candidates
for risk, conduct background checks on cargo ship crews or take stock
of people who want to open bank accounts in the United States,
documents and interviews show. It also will provide something the
company calls "terrorist risk identity assessment," a company document
shows.
Bell and his business associates said they are trying to fill wide gaps
in existing commercial databases that enable criminals and terrorists
to roam the globe, sometimes under false identities. Company founder
Donald Thibeau, a former LexisNexis executive, said he formed Global
Information in the island nation to take advantage of regulations there
that he thinks will make it easier to collect data than in the United
States, which has a hodgepodge of information and privacy laws that he
said would making doing business far more costly.
"You can realize the CAPPS dream in the commercial world," Thibeau
said. "We live in a world where data can go anywhere and be warehoused
anywhere."
Legal and privacy specialists said the company raises troubling new
questions about the ability of computers -- in both the government and
private sectors -- to collect and analyze personal information for
homeland security. These critics said Global's initiative echoes the
aims of the troubled government passenger-screening system, as well as
another controversial program at the Defense Department that was shut
down by Congress called Total Information Awareness.
An important difference from those programs, these critics said, is
that Global operates in private hands, offshore and beyond the
oversight that stymied the government programs. "As a business matter,
there are layers of legal protections and public relations protections
they can get by going offshore," Peter P. Swire, a law professor at
Ohio State University and privacy counselor in the Clinton
administration. "It might meet business interests, but not necessarily
the public interest."
Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity,
said he worries that Global will become a contractor for government
work that government officials could not get backing to do themselves.
"He is making a highly controversial program more controversial," Lewis
said about Bell. "Now he's doing it offshore and making money off of
it."
The effort comes at a sensitive time in the debate about the use of
personal information for screening and profiling, as law enforcement
and intelligence authorities embrace commercial databases and other
technology like never before to fight the war on terror. The Senate
recently approved legislation that would wire together hundreds or
thousands of local, state, federal and commercial data systems. But
that "information-sharing environment" would be accompanied by complex
rules to govern the proposed network's use and prevent abuses.
Company officials said they are not trying to evade scrutiny. They
contend that Bahamian law also protects privacy but is not as
cumbersome as U.S. regulations. They said the company's location will
help them collect information from abroad because businesses and
information brokers would be more likely to ship electronic records to
the Bahamas than to the United States. Commercial information services
in the United States have billions of records about Americans, but far
fewer about people living abroad. Bell and Thibeau argue their services
will eventually make the United States and other countries safer.
"The intent was not to run offshore and hide stuff," said Bell,
Global's chief executive. He left the government at the end of March as
director of the Office of National Risk Assessment, which ran the
aviation screening program, and previously served as an intelligence
official with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "Global
information is the brass ring."
Global was registered as an international business company in the
Bahamas two years ago. It recently received a license to conduct
business on the islands. Thibeau also registered an entity in Delaware
called Global Information Group. It is part of a broad push by
businesses and governments to examine digital personal histories more
closely in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Some of these efforts are driven by mandates in the USA Patriot Act
that require banks and other companies to be more vigilant -- in some
cases, by sending customer information to the government. The
data-analysis efforts also are part of initiatives designed to minimize
companies' exposure to lawsuits or insurance claims.
Global wants to work as a partner to large information services like
LexisNexis. Thibeau said such companies can run into obstacles trying
to gather international data themselves. For instance, critics in Latin
America accused another large information service in the United States,
ChoicePoint Inc., also a government contractor, of spying when it
became public that the company was buying databases of information
about citizens in Mexico and other countries. ChoicePoint officials
said they were misled by unscrupulous data brokers, who sold
information that should not have been sold.
"We're experimenting in places they can't," Thibeau said of the large
data companies. "They have too much to lose."
In interviews, company officials said Global is working with the
government in the Bahamas and other nations. Bell said he has had only
informal contacts with U.S. government officials.
The company's work could involve some of the same contractors hired to
build the U.S. government's screening system, documents and interviews
show. LexisNexis, for instance, hired Global as a consultant to explore
the viability of using the Bahamas as a base for collecting
international information, officials said.
A subsidiary of Britain-based Reed Elsevier Group PLC, LexisNexis is
known for its databases of legal and news documents. But it has also
taken on major roles in homeland security initiatives. It recently paid
$775 million for Seisint Inc., another information company that created
the Matrix computer system used by law enforcement authorities for
counterterrorism and criminal investigations.
One LexisNexis executive who worked closely with Bell while he was in
government is Norman A. Willox Jr., the chief officer for privacy,
industry and regulatory affairs at LexisNexis. Willox worked with Bell
on the aviation screening project. He and LexisNexis also worked with
Bell on a previous counterterrorism project at the Department of
Justice, shortly after the terror attacks on the Pentagon and the World
Trade Center.
Willox and Bell participated in industry and academic discussions about
the growing need for collecting international information. In February,
the two men traveled to the Bahamas, where they met Erik Russell, the
general manager for Cable Bahamas, a firm that manages an island
fiber-optic network, according to Willox and Russell. "They were hoping
to open a business in the Bahamas and hoping we would provide
bandwidth," Russell said. "My understanding is, they're going to need a
lot of bandwidth."
In an interview, Bell said he went to the Bahamas on vacation and did
not attend the meeting. But Willox and Russell said Bell was there,
though Willox said Bell did not participate in the discussion. Willox
said he himself was representing LexisNexis during the discussions.
Federal rules generally restrict public employees from engaging in
outside business that might conflict with work they oversee, according
to government ethics regulations. Bell said he did not become involved
with Global until after he left government in March.
After Bell left the government, Willox helped arrange the lease for a
Global office in Maryland, near where Bell lived; when asked about the
arrangement, Thibeau said Willox did so as a personal favor because he
lives in the area and knows the landlord.
It was not long after he left government that Bell was named chief
executive of Global. Several weeks later, in June, LexisNexis sponsored
a symposium in the Bahamas that featured the company. Attending the
event were financiers, a private investigator, technology executives,
Willox, LexisNexis lobbyists and Bahamian leaders, documents show. Also
attending were contractors from at least three other companies that
worked with Bell on the government's passenger "risk assessment
program," documents from the meeting show.
In a statement prepared for the event, Allyson Maynard-Gibson, the
Bahamian minister of financial services and investment, extolled
efforts to build a "state-of-the-art facility" with data centers and a
high-speed telecommunications network. This has "resulted in the
development of a new industry to manage, process and store information
in a safe and secure environment so that it is easily retrievable when
needed," she said.
Along with new business development on the island, "all of this makes
it seem natural," Maynard-Gibson's statement said, "for Grand Bahama to
become an important through point for the movement of international
data."
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