Anybody Using This First Amendment?

American investigative reporter Greg Palast writes for the London Observer and reports for BBC news. His stories have appeared in the annual Project Censored lists but rarely in mainstream American media. Palast's book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," now out in an expanded paperback edition with 40 percent new material, made the New York Times' Best Sellers list in its first week in stores.

In the opening chapter, Palast details the ways Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris rigged Florida's 2000 vote by hiring a data mining company, DataBase Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint. Harris instructed Database to sift through Florida's voter rolls to eliminate felons, suspected felons, and people with names or birth dates similar to felons. In all, according to the company's documents, some 91,000 people were wrongly barred from voting.

Of those, more than ninety percent were Democrats. The majority were black.

Q: Is ChoicePoint or one of their subsidiaries still on contract in Florida?

A: No. Well, they won't be. They are getting out of the racial purge business, but they're moving into something new and better. If you read Forbes Magazine or the new edition of my book, Forbes says, "We don't know who has lost the war on terror, but we do know who has won: ChoicePoint, Inc." They're the big contractor in Total Information Awareness. They've got the big DNA database they're keeping for the new vampiric agency. ChoicePoint owns the companies that are going to do the airport profiling, the immigration intake profiling, and, most importantly, these are the guys that have the database of over 20 billion records on Americans. Now, when I say 20 billion, that was like a year ago. It's got to be way up there now. They had it at 20 billion and growing phenomenally. Until now, for 200 years, you could not go into private records without a search warrant. Under the USA Patriot Act -- and I mean the one in force, we don't have to wait for the second shoe to drop -- for the first time in American history the feds will be able to go through private records, the private database. They call it "data mining." They're going to be hunting through our records without a search warrant, on a massive data-crunching basis. And so, ChoicePoint is going to ring the cash register big time.

Q: Your book implies that ChoicePoint is affiliated with the political right.

A: It isn't implied. Look at their board. It looks like a Republican country club meeting. You've got Ken Langone, the investor who was also the treasurer for the Rudy Giuliani for Senate campaign. You've got Bernard Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, a big Republican sugar daddy. You've got Vin Weber, the ultra-right ex-congressman who is their Washington lobbyist. You've got Howard Safir, the New York Police Chief of Repression. They've got all these Republican politicos like George Bruder out of Florida, who was deeply involved in their operations for getting rid of "the dark vote." So, look, it's a Republican firm.

Their company was chosen after they replaced a company that was only being paid about five thousand dollars a year, and Database got paid something like two million. What is it with American reporters? I mean, don't they find that interesting? I mean, if it's not in a press release, they think you might as well just throw it away.

Q: You also write about how the Bush administration stifled investigation of Saudis.

A: Yeah, well, I should stop saying that because it doesn't help the war effort. You know, a great investigator like Bob Woodward wrote that book Bush at War. I should feel ashamed about bringing up how Bush got us into war through his buddies, the Saudis.

People like Mike Moore make a lot out of the Bush connections to the Bin Laden family. That's useful to know, but I think there are more important connections.