Friday, March 21, 2008

Passport snoopers: good news and bad news

The good, or at least weird, news is that the one of the two companies involved in the peek into Barack Obama's passport file has as its chairman and CEO a Barack Obama adviser, John Brennan, of The Analysis Corporation. The bad news is that this corporation and its parent (SFA: "national security solutions provider") sees its main business line as counterterrorism, meaning the same securocrats are probably looking through all sorts of other intelligence information on Americans and US residents.

UPDATE: The Analysis Corp, unlike the other company Stanley, has yet to fire the snooper -- the delay at the request of the State Department. And Brennan has disagreed with Obama on retroactive immunity for telecom firms under Bush's modified foreign intelligence surveillance program. Looks like his own company has just become the case study in what happens when private companies start trawling through personal information.

Incidentally, Internet searches for the other company, Stanley, get more precise if you use its NYSE ticker symbol, SXE.

UPDATE: It took 24 hours from when you read it here first for the media to figure out the Brennan angle. But as usual, they try to go with a faux scandal and not look at the underlying issue of privacy and government information-gathering.

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