A Dossier on Your Life: Now Criminals May Have It. An odious outfit called ChoicePoint compiles electronic dossiers of financial and other personal data about Americans and sells the information to governments and businesses. Thanks to a California law requiring notification to people whose financial privacy may have been compromised, the company has fessed up to a grotesque privacy mess: selling the information to phony companies pretending to be legitimate businesses, as MSNBC first reported. This is undoubtedly the tip of an ugly iceberg.

The Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow, aided by a grant from the Center for Investigative Reporting, has published a brilliant multimedia Web project and book about the private data-mongers like ChoicePoint and their growing ties to government snooping machines. It's dismal stuff, and getting worse all the time.

UPDATE: In a story today, O'Harrow quotes a ChoicePoint executive this way: "ChoicePoint spokesman James Lee said the company learned for the first time yesterday the case involved people in states outside California."

Yeah, right.

Where's Congress in all this? Hiding, as usual, as the privacy of all Americans gets more and more illusory. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.]

But if you are not in California, you don't have to be notified. I guess the free market will take care of things, right, since an over-regulated indutry is an inefficient one?  6:09:11 PM