Private Spies, They're Watching You...

This is a disturbing trend in recent American history. We have always been known to support various regimes and factions, but this is a different animal all together. Coporations like Halliburton have hired mercenaries which have been directly involved in US military operations, even interrogations and detention of prisoners. Now a disturbing new trend in what I am going to call domestic warfare is Private intelligence. Apparently our civil rights prevent the CIA and other organizations from gathering some information, so instead of respecting the law and our rights to privacy, they simply subcontract domestic spying to private coporations who, as we all well know, are above the law when it comes to rights to privacy...
Take a look...

www.truthout.org...
In Age of Security, Firm Mines Wealth of Personal Data
The Washington Post
By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Thursday 20 January 2005
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.
Now the little-known information industry giant is transforming itself into a private intelligence service for national security and law enforcement tasks. It is snapping up a host of companies, some of them in the Washington area, that produce sophisticated computer tools for analyzing and sharing records in ChoicePoint's immense storehouses. In financial papers, the company itself says it provides "actionable intelligence."
"We do act as an intelligence agency, gathering data, applying analytics," said company vice president James A. Zimbardi.
ChoicePoint and other private companies increasingly occupy a special place in homeland security and crime-fighting efforts, in part because they can compile information and use it in ways government officials sometimes cannot because of privacy and information laws.

ATS Link

I posted this on the ATS News Forum. A limited response to it that you might be intereseted in checking out. Personally, I think that the government is going to do whatever/whenever they want. The only thing is that they are slowly publizing this fact. This report is one example, in my opinion.