Acxiom is watching you

Whenever you book a flight, this data-mining colossus will be turning over its files to John Ashcroft. Why did Wesley Clark lobby for what could become the biggest snooping operation of all time?

By Farhad Manjoo

Feb. 10, 2004 | On Saturday, Jan. 5, 2002, a 15-year-old boy named Charles Bishop stole a single-engine Cessna airplane from the St. Petersburg International Airport in Florida and crashed it into an office building in Tampa. The boy, who was probably mentally disturbed, died; no one else was hurt. Still, in the tense months after the 9/11 attacks, Charles Bishop's flight was one of the dozens of small, strange events that set the public imagination reeling over the horrors surrounding airplanes, and cable news shows went into overdrive to cover it. The next day on CNN, Wesley Clark, the retired Army general who was at the time the network's military analyst, was asked about "the situation in Tampa.... The fact that a teenager was able to steal this plane and crash it into a building -- what does that say about the general state of aviation security?"

"We've been worried about general aviation security for some time," Clark said. "The aircraft need to be secured, the airfields need to be secured, and obviously we're going to also have to go through and do a better job of screening who could fly aircraft, who the private pilots are, who owns these aircraft. So it's going to be another major effort."

That answer -- that pilots ought to face more-rigorous screening -- seemed logical enough; but according to some critics, Wesley Clark might have had an ulterior motive in calling for more background checks in aviation. What Clark, who is now campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, did not tell the CNN audience was that, months before the interview, he had been hired as a board member and lobbyist for Acxiom, an Arkansas company that manages data collected by large businesses on millions of Americans. Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the company developed a computerized system that would perform instant identity checks on airline passengers. The company paid Clark -- as well as other Washington lobbyists -- to "use some of his connections to make sales calls to the government," says Jennifer Barrett, Acxiom's chief privacy officer.

Acxiom was not the only company hawking background-checking applications in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. At the time, several information technology firms -- either out of patriotic duty or to service the bottom line -- stepped up their efforts to demonstrate the virtues of surveillance programs to officials. Government records indicate that after the attacks, ChoicePoint, the giant database firm based in Georgia, spent at least $280,000 on lobbyists who discussed background checking and the PATRIOT Act with federal officials. Another firm, EagleCheck, a small start-up in Cleveland, also met repeatedly with federal officials to promote its own airline passenger identity-checking system.

None of this is surprising; after 9/11, companies that sell data-mining systems quite naturally saw a market for their wares in Washington. What is eyebrow raising is the degree to which the government was paying attention and how quickly corporate concepts morphed into government programs.

Wesley Clark's sales calls on behalf of Acxiom offer a case in point. Before the general met with federal authorities, there's no sign that officials were contemplating using background-checking systems to secure air travel. But after months of Clark's lobbying, the government announced the creation of CAPPS II -- a passenger "prescreening" system that will perform instant background checks on everyone who flies. Although much about the government's system remains a mystery, at the broadest level it looks remarkably like Acxiom's initial plans. And Acxiom has been awarded a key contract to work on parts of the system.

Did the government's airline background-checking plan, which many prominent liberal and conservative activists say is too invasive of the flying public's privacy, have its genesis in a corporate background-checking plan? The government won't say; it has generally kept mum about the origins of CAPPS II, and officials at the Transportation Security Administration did not respond to several inquiries for more information about the origins of the plan.

But it's clear that Acxiom and other data firms actively pushed the government toward data-mining security programs, and that the government's decision to embark on CAPPS II was heavily influenced by these companies. Acxiom disputes the idea that the company is responsible for CAPPS II -- "I think they were headed there anyway," Barrett says -- but the firm acknowledges that authorities needed some guidance when it came to information technology, guidance that Acxiom was happy to provide. After the 9/11 attacks, "we felt that the government was going to need to move in a direction, much like a private sector [company] already had, toward this technology," Barrett says. "And you don't build that yourself."

To some privacy advocates Acxiom's role in CAPPS II signals the worst kind of commingling of private and public sector. A company that keeps data on millions of Americans approached the government with a plan to use that data in a way that, at least to some, resembles a vast travel surveillance program. "This may have been the most successful marketing campaign in history," says Bill Scannell, a former journalist who is now a full-time CAPPS II protester. "They came up with the product, they packaged it, and they managed to lobby to make it the government's plan. If it's true, it's so diabolical and so evil that I don't even know where to begin. You've got a company that came up with a plan to make money that directly involved messing with the U.S. Constitution and rights that the country has enjoyed for the past 200 years."

And, to further add spice to the mix, Wes Clark, on the campaign trail, has strongly criticized the PATRIOT Act and President Bush's stance on civil liberties. Lobbyist, screen thyself?

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