‘Access without accountability’
Privacy rights advocate Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center said the revelations highlight a serious problem with the use of electronic investigation tools such as ChoicePoint’s database: Law enforcement officials might abuse such systems to conduct personal searches.

“One concern … is the problem of law enforcement having access without accountability,” he said. Hoofnagle said he warned of this problem four years ago in a law journal article titled “Big Brother’s Little Helper."

“This clearly raises the question of whether or not anyone is overseeing law enforcement users of ChoicePoint," he said.

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But Hoofnagle did praise the ability of Choicepoint auditors to uncover these incidents.

“That's a good thing, that ChoicePoint found these errant users of the system and that the public has received notice of them,” he said.

Lee said ChoicePoint does all it can to make sure its service is used legitimately, but he said the firm’s clients also need to guard internally against misuse.

“We are using our technology to the degree that we can ensure searches are proper, but with any customer there has to be internal controls,” he said.

Congress is currently debating legislation that would make customer notifications when private data is leaked mandatory nationwide, imitating a state law that protects California residents.

However, currently it's not clear which firm would have the responsibility to send the notifications: ChoicePoint, which owns the data, or the companies with the rogue employees that allegedly stole the data. While ChoicePoint was not necessarily legally obliged to send the notifications, the company chose to do so "to avoid arm-wrestling" with the other firms, Lee said.

So far this year, nearly 50 million consumers’ data has been reported lost, stolen, or exposed to hackers. ChoicePoint’s data theft, first reported Feb. 14 on MSNBC.com, began a string of reported incidents that has highlighted the fragility of systems used to protect consumer data.

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