Those Prying Eyes.

Is Uncle Sam playing the role of Big Brother in Latin America? It seems that way to many government officials and private citizens in Mexico and nine other countries in the hemisphere. A Georgia-based data- collecting company named ChoicePoint has acknowledged that it's been quietly compiling information on tens of millions of ordinary Latin Americans without their consent or knowledge--and the firm has been selling the data to U.S. government agencies for the past 18 months. An Associated Press reporter uncovered the operation last April, sparking an outcry in some Latin American countries. Mexico forced ChoicePoint to stop collecting records on its citizens a month later. But the firm is still mining data on businesses in Brazil, and on individuals in other South and Central American countries, prompting authorities in Colombia, Argentina and Nicaragua to open formal probes.

Company officials say they have broken no privacy laws in the countries and have culled their data only from public records. But some government officials dispute that assertion. Nicaraguan authorities allege that ChoicePoint has collected confidential details about private citizens, including their outstanding debts, bank accounts and home-ownership records, a charge that company executives adamantly deny. Colombian Congressman Gustavo Petro has publicly accused ChoicePoint of violating privacy statutes, and the country's attorney general is investigating. "This is the first time anything like this has happened," says Petro, who vows to seek the extradition of company officials if they refuse to disclose their sources of information inside Colombia. "Thirty million Colombians have been placed in the databases of U.S. agencies."

ChoicePoint began hawking information about Latin Americans to the U.S. government under a $1 million contract with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) that was signed in 2002. The company's chief marketing officer, James Lee, says the service was primarily used by the INS division in charge of investigating foreign nationals accused of committing crimes in the United States. The contract was taken over by the Department of Homeland Security after it absorbed the INS earlier this year. A Homeland Security spokesman told NEWSWEEK that "99 percent" of the information obtained by ChoicePoint "is gathered from within the United States and includes information about criminal records, criminal warrants, credit reports and other ...