October 16, 2004 - Homeland Security is being outsourced. So is your privacy. The Department of Homeland Security has spent some $100 million of your tax dollars to create an internet based data mining and screening system to use your financial and personal information matched to profiles to assess the likelihood of you being a terrorist. Of course the system might also be used in the private sector to assess the possibility that you might be a labor union agitator, a whistle blower, a liberal dissenter, or any of a number of categories not compatible with corporate loyalty. But that can’t happen in a society in which the privacy of the citizen is protected by law – unless the system is operated offshore where the citizen’s privacy is not a concern.

Ben H. Bell III has found such an offshore location in the Bahamas. One of the architects of the controversial data mining projects known as CAPS, CAPSII, and now Secure Flight, Bell has signed up with a private company located in the Bahamas taking his technical knowledge and expertise with him. His new employer, Global Information Group Ltd, will operate beyond the reach of US law and use the technologies developed by the Defense and Homeland Security departments to mine the Internet for personal information, assemble it into a massive database and sell risk assessment services to corporations, governments, insurance companies, and other information services world wide; all at a healthy profit, of course, and beyond US regulations and privacy protection laws. The new concern has already signed up its first customer, LexisNexis Group, the information service company that was one of the prime contractors working on Secure Flight and its predecessor, the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program run by John Poindexter and shut down by Congress.

According to Donald Thibeau, the former LexisNexis executive who founded Global Information, "You can realize the CAPPS dream in the commercial world. We live in a world where data can go anywhere and be warehoused anywhere." He picked the Bahamas precisely because its privacy protection laws are practically non-existent and will make operation of the Big Brother system easier and more profitable.

Well, there you have it. In the post-911 world a system to amass and organize your personal information; your financial and medical records; the record of your travels and credit card transactions; and that myriad of information about you that is available in public and private records is going offshore and will be available to anyone willing to pay the price. Big Brother is alive and well and living in the Bahamas You have been outsourced!