Yahoo! News - At Least 700 Have Identities Stolen
SAN FRANCISCO - At least 700 people had their identities stolen during a yearlong scam by con artists who had signed up as clients of data-broker ChoicePoint Inc., the Los Angeles task force in charge of the criminal investigation confirmed on Friday.

When word first emerged this week that still unknown scammers had illegally obtained detailed dossiers on 35,000 people by posing as legitimate customers of ChoicePoint, the company portrayed it as a relatively minor criminal case, limited to California.

But by week's end, it was shaping up to be a full-blown scandal with as many as a half million people nationwide potentially vulnerable to identity theft.

Outraged, attorneys general from 38 states demanded that ChoicePoint warn any victims in their states as well, and politicians, consumer advocates and security experts called for more federal oversight of a lightly regulated industry that gathers and sells personal data about nearly every adult American.

An Alpharetta, Ga.-based spinoff from the credit-reporting giant Equifax, ChoicePoint maintains databases that hold 19 billion Social Security numbers, credit and medical histories, motor vehicle registrations, job applications, lawsuits, criminal files, professional licenses and other pieces of sensitive information. ChoicePoint also owns a DNA analysis lab and facilitates drug testing for employers.

But ChoicePoint and other privately owned aggregators of personal information operate with virtually no federal oversight, and critics say the companies haven't done enough to safeguard their information-rich databases.

"There's a serious problem that we as a nation don't seem to grasp — that the public is at risk whenever organizations collect massive amounts of information about us and they don't take extraordinary precautions to ensure that that information is protected," said Dr. Larry Ponemon, who runs a research firm in Tucson, Ariz., dedicated to privacy management in business and government. "People ought to be standing in lines protesting this."

Big Business is watching YOU! But apparently they don't watch the people they give the information to. Ouch.