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Curling went on to say that ChoicePoint had received $10 million in Homeland Security funds in 2003, on top of $20 million the year before. During a conference call two months earlier, he told financial analysts: "Our success has been, and probably will continue to be, in taking the core competencies of ChoicePoint and finding opportunities to apply those in governmental or Homeland Security initiatives."

With that, Curling may have ushered in a new sort of Total Information Awareness: a centralized government database in corporate database clothing -- Poindexter's dream, privatized.

Despite ChoicePoint's assurances of self-regulation and its salutes to corporate responsibility, the fact is it's someone else's job, not ChoicePoint's, to impose restrictions on the company -- and to be sure they're enforced.

Former US Rep. Cynthia McKinney, the only member of Congress to question and hold hearings on the role ChoicePoint played in the Florida election, says she was trying to investigate all the government's contracts with ChoicePoint before her defeat in the August 2002 primary. "My work was cut short," she says. "But it still needs to be done."

Another of ChoicePoint's major critics is from the right. Former Rep. Bob Barr calls the government's unfettered access to private databases inexcusable.

"I think clearly the government is now turning more and more to private industry to do its dirty work," Barr says, "to gather information on people, manipulate that information on people and, in so doing, circumvent the Privacy Act."

Barr says that until recently, the quiet on Capitol Hill regarding private data collectors has been deafening. But there has been a congressional awakening, of sorts.

In July, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced the Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act, which would require federal departments to report to Congress their use of private databases.

"Risks to personal privacy are heightened when personal information from different sources, including public records, is aggregated in a single file and made accessible to thousands of national security, law enforcement and intelligence personnel," says the bill, currently hung up in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

While conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have bristled at Wyden's proposed reforms, even ChoicePoint acknowledges there's a lag between the rapid pace at which data-collection technology has evolved and the slow modernization of regulations.

"We certainly agree that technology has far outstripped the legal framework," Lee says. "Let's not debate whether this is good or bad. It is what it is. We can't roll back the technology. We can't make the information go away. So let's spend our time legitimately debating what are the uses of the data."

But ChoicePoint's financial health, as the company's SEC filings attest, is highly susceptible to the success of the privacy debate. The SEC documents describe how the lobbying efforts of "consumer advocates, privacy advocates and government regulators" could have an "adverse affect on our business." Of particular concern would be "an amendment, enactment or interpretation of laws."

Any updating of the law would mean that ChoicePoint just might have to shrink from a potentially lucrative market -- as it did with the voter-scrub-list business and the assimilation of data on Latin Americans.

But the company has proved itself clever enough to adapt. Judging from the bold new lines of data it's developing, it will continue to do so.

ChoicePoint's hope for the future is to take data collection off the paper trail -- off the electronic paper trail, even -- and into the realm of biometrics. Loosely defined, biometrics is a way of identifying individuals by their biological features, including fingerprints and DNA, as well as scans of our retinas, and even the way we walk.

Hints about ChoicePoint's biometrics experiment have surfaced in a federal lawsuit filed against the company in January. In the complaint, a New York technology consultant firm, International Biometric Group, is suing for breach of contract and violation of trade secrets.

According to court documents, ChoicePoint allegedly is $660,000 behind in payments for a "programming code for storing and transmitting biometric data ... that would result in the creation of central biometric authority." The complaint also states ChoicePoint has been providing access to technology, developed by IBG, that's "not commonly known to the public."

One privacy advocate says his reading of the lawsuit leads him to believe ChoicePoint might hold a clandestine contract with the FBI: "The FBI contract could deal with the issue of biometrics," says EPIC attorney Hoofnagle.

But according to Lee, ChoicePoint's biometrics project is not as cryptic as the complaint makes it seem. He says ChoicePoint's biometrics lab, Bode Technologies, intends to develop technology that will allow businesses to verify employees' identities using fingerprinting or some other biometric in the short term, DNA down the road.