Choice Point + NSA = TIA

The phone mining that the NSA is conducting does not use info of who owns or is using the phone and is therefor "legal". Yea right! The government also has a contract with Choice Point. They have the ability to gather any info, SS#, gun registration, health records, political affiliation etc, etc. from a name address or PHONE NUMBER! After the furor caused about Poindexter's Total Information Awareness, the program was "shut down". Well kids, it,s back. Only this time they think that we won't recognize it because it has two faces.We are not that stupid. Get on the phones and demand our reps to investigate these contracts and how this information is being used. I am outraged!

.... The Terrorist Surveillance Program.

TERROR IS bush & Company's out for everything

Want to count the vote in Warren County in secret so you can flip votes & stuff ...... Terror
Want to try to convince voters that bush needs to stay in office .... terror
Want to invade a country to make a neo con wet dream come true ..... terror
Want to develop a d-base for political and business reasons of
everybody in the country ..... terror

The real Terror is George W Bush and his gang of crooks.

they should just call it "Rainbows and Unicorns" then nobody would challenge it.

from my files...fly

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm

TIA Lives On
By Shane Harris, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006


A controversial counter-terrorism program, which lawmakers halted more than two years ago amid outcries from privacy advocates, was stopped in name only and has quietly continued within the intelligence agency now fending off charges that it has violated the privacy of U.S. citizens.


It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget.

Research under the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program -- which developed technologies to predict terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal records of people in the United States -- was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency, according to documents obtained by National Journal and to intelligence sources familiar with the move. The names of key projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities, but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.

It is no secret that some parts of TIA lived on behind the veil of the classified intelligence budget. However, the projects that moved, their new code names, and the agencies that took them over haven't previously been disclosed. Sources aware of the transfers declined to speak on the record for this story because, they said, the identities of the specific programs are classified.

Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., documents and sources confirm. One piece was the Information Awareness Prototype System, the core architecture that tied together numerous information extraction, analysis, and dissemination tools developed under TIA. The prototype system included privacy-protection technologies that may have been discontinued or scaled back following the move to ARDA.

Some of you will recall that Capitol Hill Blue reported on the phoenix-like (double entendre intended) rebirth of the TIA program way back in June of 2004.

He's been taking crap for that story for close to two years now.

I just thought it would be nice for someone at DU to remember and recognize that Mr. Thompson is now one step closer to being shown to be correct. As with other fringe reporters these days, the limbs that Thompson went out on so many months and years ago are growing shorter, and shorter, and shorter.

this a.m. that it was ChoicePoint who disenfranchised 1000's of blacks in Florida in 2000.

then read this and see the set up happening ..the "fix " for the next election in calif????????

Dan Walters: Fewer and fewer (CA) state Democrats
DAN WALTERS THE SACRAMENTO BEE
Fewer and fewer state Democrats

May 13, 2006

State election officials released new voter registration data late last month, and they were bad news for Democrats. The Democrats' share of the state's 15.6 million registered voters, 42.7 percent, is 2.5 percentage points lower than it was four years ago, 4.1 percentage points lower than it was eight years ago, and 6.2 percentage points lower than it was 12 years ago. There are, in fact, about 200,000 fewer registered Democrats than in 1994, even though the number of potential voters has risen by nearly 4 million since then and the number of registered voters is up by 1.5 million.

Do we see a pattern here? Democratic politicians may comfort themselves with the fact that during that 12-year period, the party has maintained strong majorities in the congressional delegation and the Legislature, and won both U.S. Senate seats and nearly all other statewide offices – but that stems largely from Republicans' self-destructive tendency to field right-wing candidates unacceptable to independent voters. The fact remains that the Democrats' share of the electorate has skidded downward from 57-plus percent three decades ago to scarcely 40 percent today, and continues to shrink.

Republicans haven't directly benefited from the Democrats' decline. The new data confirmed that the GOP's share remains virtually fixed at just under 35 percent – almost exactly where it was 30 years ago when Democrats were flirting with 60 percent. But that also means that the margin separating the two parties is the lowest it's been since the 1930s. It also means that the ever-growing ranks of independents – up from 10.3 percent in 1994 to 18.3 percent today – are increasingly decisive in any seriously contested elections, such as this year's duel for the governorship.

(snip)

Simply put, the slower-growing – but very populous – urban counties along the coast are becoming increasingly Democratic, while the faster-growing inland counties are becoming increasingly Republican. It's really a two-pronged phenomenon. California's population growth is driven almost entirely by foreign immigration, which for the most part is going into the urban centers, while inland suburbs are growing largely because of movement of middle-class families from the cities.

That shift – perhaps a form of white flight – means that urban centers such as Los Angeles are undergoing rapid socioeconomic and cultural transformation even though their overall populations are growing slowly. And because immigrants are either ineligible to vote, or vote only scantily, the relative political importance of the urban centers is slowly diminishing.

(snip)


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060513/news_l...

:kick:

FROM MY FILES..

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=327&row=2

VANISHING VOTES by Greg Palast
The Nation
May 17, 2004 Issue
Monday, May 17, 2004

SNIP:

On October 29, 2002, George W. Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). Hidden behind its apple-pie-and-motherhood name lies a nasty civil rights time bomb.First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.



The purge is back, big time. Following the disclosure in December 2000 of the black voter purge in Britain's Observer newspaper, NAACP lawyers sued the state. The civil rights group won a written promise from Governor Jeb and from Harris's successor to return wrongly scrubbed citizens to the voter rolls. According to records given to the courts by ChoicePoint, the company that generated the computerized lists, the number of Floridians who were questionably tagged totals 91,000. Willie Steen is one of them. Recently, I caught up with Steen outside his office at a Tampa hospital. Steen's case was easy. You can't work in a hospital if you have a criminal record. (My copy of Harris's hit list includes an ex-con named O'Steen, close enough to cost Willie Steen his vote.) The NAACP held up Steen's case to the court as a prime example of the voter purge evil.



The state admitted Steen's innocence. But a year after the NAACP won his case, Steen still couldn't register. Why was he still under suspicion? What do we know about this "potential felon," as Jeb called him? Steen, unlike our President, honorably served four years in the US military. There is, admittedly, a suspect mark on his record: Steen remains an African-American.



If you're black, voting in America is a game of chance. First, there's the chance your registration card will simply be thrown out. Millions of minority citizens registered to vote using what are called motor-voter forms. And Republicans know it. You would not be surprised to learn that the Commission on Civil Rights found widespread failures to add these voters to the registers. My sources report piles of dust-covered applications stacked up in election offices.

foia from my files...fly


http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/contractors_table.html


Approved Contractors for BAA-02-08: Total Information Awareness
"Statement of Work" documents for the Total Information Awareness project have been obtained through EPIC's FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Defense. The Statement of Work describes the project deliverables and timeline. These documents can be viewed by following the links in the "Project Title" category in the table below. (April 4)

Source: Documents obtained by EPIC under the Freedom of Information Act. The Contractor, Control #, Protect Title, and Defense Contract have been taken from letters sent to contractors. These letters are available for download in four parts: ). The Project Title is linked to a Statement of Work (in PDF) if available. The Contract Date and Amount have been taken from forms describing each contract awarded. These individual forms have been linked (as PDF files) from each budgeted amount shown below.



* - Contract awarded in the amount of $4,774,046.00 on 11/21/02. It is unclear which Alphatech project this applies to, as project titles were not referenced on contract award documents.

See also Naval Air Warfare Center Training contract with Poindexter's former employer, Syntek Technologies, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of British Maritime Technologies). Contract No. N61339-02-C-0131, for $5,021,451.00, signed on September 20, 2002 for unspecified work.


must go and read this too much to post here!!

http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/tia/

EPIC Urges Scrutiny of Proposed Federal Profiling Agency. In a letter (pdf) to a House subcommittee, EPIC urged careful scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security's proposed Office of Screening Coordination and Operations. This office would oversee vast databases of digital fingerprints and photographs, eye scans and personal information from millions of American citizens and lawful foreign visitors. Homeland Security has announced that the office's operations would be conducted in a manner that safeguards civil liberties, but the agency has not yet explained how it proposes to protect privacy rights or ensure accountability. For more information, visit EPIC's U.S. Domestic Spending on Surveillance Page. (Mar. 1, 2005)

Docs Show Meetings Between Clark, Poindexter. New documents (pdf) show that General Wesley Clark, a lobbyist for commercial data company Acxiom, met with former Total Information Awareness developer, Admiral John Poindexter in May and June 2002. Previously obtained documents from the same time period indicate that Acxiom was considered as a source of personal information for a government "mega-scale database." For more information, see the EPIC Total Information Awareness Page. (Sept. 13, 2004)

Study Finds Extensive Data Mining in Federal Agencies. The General Accounting Office has issued a report (pdf) that identifies almost 200 data mining projects throughout the federal government that are either operational or in the planning stage. Many of them make use of personally identifiable data obtained from private sector databases. Sen. Daniel Akaka, who requested the study, released a statement and said, "It is time that we review agency practices and existing law to ensure that the privacy rights of individuals are not violated through the development of new technology." (May 27)

Committee Calls for Data Mining Privacy Protections. The Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee has issued a report (3.5 MB pdf) recommending that Congress pass laws to protect civil liberties when the government sifts through computer databases containing personal information. The committee, established to review the Defense Department data mining initiatives after the Total Information Awareness fiasco, also proposed that federal agencies be required to obtain authorization from a special federal court "before engaging in data mining with personally identifiable information concerning U.S. persons." For more information, see the EPIC Total Information Awareness Page. (May 17, 2004)


k&R...........

fly

C'mon everyone! Let's do it!

The CAPPS II program and Ben H. Bell, IIIrd's company. But the big item Palast divulges is that ChoicePoint is essentially a Republican operation. Besides that Signal Intelligence is based across the state of GA at Ft Gordon which is helpful too. Offshoring and outsourcing the datamining analysis in the Bahamas is designed to vacuum up every US citizen's info, especially those pesky political opponents with liberal tendencies.

see

"DATA MINER TO OFFSHORE PROFILING SYSTEM

The architect of controversial government data mining programs has
taken his ideas to a private, offshore company, the Washington Post
has reported. Ben H. Bell III, the former director of the Office of
National Risk Assessment, helped design the now-defunct Computer
Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening program (CAPPS II), and is now using
similar concepts and technology with his new employer, Bahama-based
Global Information Group Ltd. CAPPS II, a data mining system that
strived to color-code threats by airline passengers based on
pattern-matching algorithms, was derailed by Congress due to concerns
about effectiveness and privacy implications. Global Information
intends to privatize this "terrorist risk identity assessment," as
well as perform checks on cargo ship crews, foreign job candidates,
and those who wish to open U.S. bank accounts. By basing its
operations in the Bahamas, the private company is able to avoid U.S.
regulatory standards and oversight of its handling of sensitive
personal data.

For more information about CAPPS II, see EPIC's Passenger Profiling
Page:

http://www.epic.org/privacy/airtravel/profiling ""

from
www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_11.20.html also see

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=364&topic_id=1171251&mesg_id=1178662

Is it any wonder that Democrats like Ted Kennedy and Green Party members get 'special treatment' when trying to fly ?

Gen Hayden probably also falls into the CIA's long line of Knights of Malta upper eschelon (sorry for the pun). Read Martin A. Lee's "Their Will Be Done" article in motherjones.com's archives and you'll see what I mean.

You may also want to investigate Ptech and its wargame coincidence during 9-11. It is now called GoAgile.

Gotta run !

The Admin excused itself from not reading and correctly interpreting the information it had before 9/11 that said that an attack was imminent. (Remember 'the system was blinking red' and 'Bin Laden determined to strike in the US'?) The Admin didn't have enough trained Arabic speaking people to listen to the conversations it did have. (And didn't the Admin fire some trained people because they were gay? Apparently being gay was a greater threat to the Republic than Al Qaeda according to these idiots.)

There have been some Identity Theft hearings before the Senate that have called ChoicePoint, LexisNexis and other huge Data management companies in for discussions. Listen to this hearing and read between lines of what is being said. http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/witnesslist.cfm?id=1491

Somebody is being paid to database the info the NSA is gathering. I think the folks at ChoicePoint and LexisNexis were worried about this a year ago in this hearing. I am worried about the info being collected, categorized, used by the government and also sold to other interests. (The point came up during this hearing, anything against selling the info they had to PACs. No, nothing in the law prohibits this. If the Data Storage Cos have this massive info and there are no laws that say what they can and cannot do with it, ahm, well, all sorts of interesting things can happen.)

Pay attention to the Telecom hearings this week. They are crucial.

Again, pay attention to the new Communications Bill and the final hearings and the markup.

THIS MATTERS and is germaine to the discussion. Commerce regulates the Data Storage cos.

I am fucking shocked at how people - including my dad - have been duped by these weasels and the lame explanations about how this no big deal :mad:

Nation of fucking dupes!

FROM MY FILES..ON CHOICEPOINT...


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3186.htm

U.S. government purchase data on Mexico’s 65 million registered Voters
Sale of Mexican voter data raises storm

Story by : CR Staff

05/01/03: (Guadalajara Reporter) A probe has been launched into how the Atlanta-based corporation ChoicePoint Inc. was able to purchase data on Mexico’s 65 million registered voters as well as six million licensed drivers in Mexico City.


SNIP:

James Lee, a spokesman for the company, defended ChoicePoint's activities on grounds that its data-gathering was a valuable tool in the fight against terrorism and organized crime. Lee declared that information obtained by his company "can be used in any type of criminal investigation, whether it involves terrorism or some other type of crime. It is useful in identifying suspicious individuals and in some cases it can even pinpoint their whereabouts."


These protestations fell on deaf ears in Mexico. Raul Carranca, a well-known jurist, said that ChoicePoint's purchase of names in the Federal Electoral Register and of drivers' licenses constituted an invasion of Mexico's sovereignty. He added that under the Federal Penal Code an offender could receive up to 12 years in prison for damaging, destroying or illegally extracting data from a government informational system for reasons of personal gain.



Particularly biting were the comments of columnist Marcela Gomez Zalce. In Acentos, her widely-read column, Gomez Zalce expressed the opinion that data obtained by ChoicePoint would end up in the hands of the CIA, FBI and DEA. As for the protestations of such parliamentary groups as National Action Party and the formerly ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that they would move toward protecting the privacy of Mexicans, she said that this was a classic case of covering the well after the baby has drowned -- Spanish version of "locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen."


In addition to Mexico, ChoicePoint's shadow has fallen over Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. However, the company has discontinued its role in Argentina, due to lack of demand and a strict new law relating to privacy.

FROM MY FILES..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,949709,00.html

Firm in Florida election fiasco earns millions from files on foreigners

Oliver Burkeman in Washington and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City
Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian

SNIPS:
A data-gathering company that was embroiled in the Florida 2000 election fiasco is being paid millions of dollars by the Bush administration to collect detailed personal information on the populations of foreign countries, enraging several governments who say the records may have been illegally obtained.
US government purchasing documents show that the company, ChoicePoint, received at least $11m (£6.86m) from the department of justice last year to supply data - mainly on Latin Americans - that included names and addresses, occupations, dates of birth, passport numbers and "physical description". Even tax records and blood groups are reportedly included.

Nicaraguan police have raided two offices suspected of providing the information. The revelations threaten to shatter public trust in electoral institutions, especially in Mexico, where the government has begun an investigation.


The controversy is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint. The company's subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes.

Legal experts in the US and Mexico said ChoicePoint could be liable for prosecution if those who supplied it with the personal information could be proven to have broken local laws. That raises the possibility that any person whose data was accessible to American officials could take legal action against the US government.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E6DD1531F936A25751C0A9669C8B63

THIS IS A NYT ARTICLE NOW ARCHIVED IT HAS TO BE PURCHASED BUT THIS IS THE JIST OF IT...


COMPANY NEWS; CHOICEPOINT AGREES TO BUY DBT ONLINE FOR $423 MILLION


Published: February 15, 2000
ChoicePoint Inc., a provider of information to the insurance industry, agreed to buy DBT Online Inc. for about $423 million in stock to add DBT's online public-record services to its offerings. DBT Online shareholders will receive 0.525 share of ChoicePoint stock for every DBT share. ChoicePoint, which is based in Alpharetta, Ga., said the purchase of DBT would add civil public-record information to its offerings. DBT is based in Boca Raton, Fla.

please do read this entire article..its very important..too much to post here!!



http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022106a.html

Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs'
By Nat Parry
February 21, 2006

snip:

Detention Centers

Plus, there was that curious development in January when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million contract to construct detention centers somewhere in the United States, to deal with “an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs,” KBR said.

snip:

Labor Camps

There also was another little-noticed item posted at the U.S. Army Web site, about the Pentagon’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program. This program “provides Army policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army installations.”
The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a “rapid action revision” on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision provides a “template for developing agreements” between the Army and corrections facilities for the use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations.

snip:


Pentagon Surveillance

Despite the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibitions against U.S. military personnel engaging in domestic law enforcement, the Pentagon has expanded its operations beyond previous boundaries, such as its role in domestic surveillance activities.
The Washington Post has reported that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Defense Department has been creating new agencies that gather and analyze intelligence within the United States.



This receipt of information presumably would include data from the National Security Agency, which has been engaging in surveillance of U.S. citizens without court-approved warrants in apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. Bush approved the program of warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11.
There also may be an even more extensive surveillance program. Former NSA employee Russell D. Tice told a congressional committee on Feb. 14 that such a top-secret surveillance program existed, but he said he couldn’t discuss the details without breaking classification laws.

Dirty Dealings in Data

Jim Hightower's Lowdown

Saturday, April 5, 2003

Last month, Forbes reported on "a few winners" already emerging from the war on terror. "High up on the list of businesses that will benefit...ChoicePoint Inc."

~snip~

ChoicePoint, Palast reports, is a database company with prominent Republicans on its board and payroll, and it now offers up over 20 billion pieces of information on American citizens to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Since passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the feds can access all that formerly private info without a search warrant.

The PATRIOT Act also requires banks to make their databases accessible to info-operators such as ChoicePoint, so a company called Sybase has started selling a "PATRIOT-compliant" software patch. The lucky big investor in Sybase? Winston Partners, founded by presidential brother Marvin Bush.

Even though Congress voted to kill the Orwellian Total Information Awareness project (see The Lowdown, Jan. 2002), snoop-in-chief John Poindexter is still issuing lucrative contracts for spying on you and me. To "mine" our citizen profiles for useful info, Poindexter chose Syntek, where he himself worked as a senior VP before Bush tapped him to run TIA.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=206&row=2


imo, Poindexter was working on all of this snooping technology and program (DARPA contracts) long before Sept. 11 with syntek.org being central to building it ... readying things ... so, when he was given the Pentagon post, he essentially rolled Syntek and its 'work' ........ Syntek.org being a dotted line to the Pentagon on an org chart ...

despite Congress saying 'no' ... they just went on with it ...

and, Poppy Bu$h pardoned Poindexter?


Jan/Feb 2003 - VOLUME 24 - NUMBERS 1 & 2

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T h e B u s i n e s s o f W a r
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Total Business Awareness

The Corporate Contracting
Behind John Poindexter’s
Total Information Awareness Program

By Adam Mayle and Alex Knott

The Total Information Awareness System, the controversial Pentagon research program that aims to gather and analyze a vast array of information on people in the United States, has hired at least eight private companies to work on the effort. Since 1997, those companies have won contracts from the Defense Department agency that oversees the program worth $88 million.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which oversees the Total Information Awareness System (TIA), awarded 13 contracts to Booz Allen & Hamilton amounting to more than $23 million. Lockheed Martin Corporation had 23 contracts worth $27 million. The Schafer Corporation had nine contracts totaling $15 million. Other prominent contractors involved in the TIA program include SRS Technologies, Adroit Systems, CACI Dynamic Systems, Syntek Technologies and ASI Systems International.

TIA itself was first proposed by an employee of a private contractor. John Poindexter, who worked on DARPA projects for Syntek, an Arlington, Virginia-based technical and engineering services firm, suggested the program in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Poindexter, who headed the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, was convicted in 1990 on five felony counts for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. The convictions were overturned in 1991 because he had been given immunity for his testimony during the Congressional investigation of the affair. On January 14, 2002, he returned to the government as the director of the Information Awareness Office (IAO).

~snip~

Syntek was a contractor for the Genoa Project providing "specialized technical and programmatic" advice for more than five years. According to his resumÈ -- which had been posted on the home page of the Information Awareness Office (which oversees TIA) until November, when it was removed along with the resumÈs of other IAO personnel -- Poindexter joined Syntek in 1996. The first documented reference to Syntek's involvement in Genoa indicates that the company began working for DARPA by mid-1996. Since 1997, Syntek received nine contracts from DARPA totaling $1.18 million. Poindexter worked for Project Genoa via Syntek through 2001 before returning to the Defense Department as the director of the Information Awareness Office.

~snip~

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2003/03jan-feb/jan-feb03corp3.html

I worked for USAA for a while...They get information on credit, tickets, accidents, DUI's...etc....They have a huge database on everyone that drives a vehicle.

This might be too crazy to consider..but say you had pretty much unlimited access to millions of Americans' phone records and credit card purchases, and you issued a completely phony terror alert encouraging Americans to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting...say, 12-18 months before a critical reelection campaign kicks into high gear.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/11/emergency.supplies/

Then you collect the credit card info from Home Depot/Lowe's and similar chain hardware stores on every purchase that includes the combination of duct tape and plastic sheeting, and cross reference that information to your phone database.

Wouldn't you have just about the best possible viral marketing tool to target the easily panicked and EVERYONE they call? You could shortcut past many steps on the solicitation path to finding people who are a) paying attention to your bogus terror alerts, b) gullible enough to believe that duct tape and plastic sheeting will protect them from 'dirty bombs' or whatever other idiotic scare of the week you're pushing, c) motivated enough to act on their panic, d) proven to be willing to part with their money and time based on nothing more than your say-so.

Seems like a good recipe for data-mining your way to an 'invisible grassroots' calling/email list.

Crazy thought, I know...but I don't think a whole lot crazier than the idea that these phone records have any hope of unearthing terror cells...

:kick: