Just read the TPM posting about the NSA spy plan and the gut feeling that Josh Marshall has about a third party vendor being involved. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/... Could ChoicePoint be that vendor? Last night while driving home, I heard ChoicePoint's PR guy on the radio with Randi Rhodes on Air America. She was grilling him fairly well about what ChoicePoint does and doesn't do but I think she missed one point that stuck out in my mind. The PR guy, Mr. Lee I believe it was, said that ChoicePoint doesn't collect phone records, medical data, credit reports, etc etc. He said that they simply verify information for consumer agencies like stores and employers doing background checks. He made a few points very clear, they don't COLLECT the sensitive private data that we are all worried about, BUT he did NOT say that ChoicePoint would not take that data that had been collected by another agency and use that to verify and provide reports back to the government just like they do with information provided by an employer to be verified by ChoicePoint, he used an example of an employee filling out a job application, and then ChoicePoint uses the data provided on the application to run verifications. He also mentioned that ChoicePoint sells software, could they be providing software to "lay" over the top of an NSA database? Could the NSA be providing phone records or could the phone companies be providing phone record data directly to ChoicePoint? ChoicePoint then gets to deny providing sensitive data and the phone companies get to deny providing sensitive data directly to the NSA.

The careful parsing of language and non-denial denials that I've been hearing lately have made me acutely paranoid about what these companies are saying and made me start to look for the angle. This is what I've been thinking about. Am I that far off base?