Answer: Because Mukasey's son works for Bracewell & Guiliani, who works for Verizon, which is one of the telcos "they" want protected from prosecution. Mukasey & Giuliani go way back.
For my first posts here I've been telling you about the Total Information Awareness program in 2002-2004. It was my suspicion, and that of many others, that TIA was the core technology behind the AT&T wiretapping fiasco, which is behind the FISA telco immunity debcle.
But now I'm starting to wonder. Let me tell you a bit about another massive syping program that got underway just after 9/11. Warning: no conclusions yet.
Backstory
Long ago, way back in the 1980's, a fellow named Hank Asher was a cocaine smuggler in Florida. He was never convicted of any crimes, but has admitted to them in private. In 1992 he founded Database Technologies (later called DBT Online Inc.) a data mining company. He used clustered PCs to provide parallel computational power without the cost associated with mainframes. I remember reading about this in my electronics/computer magazines.
Asher was ousted from DBT by board member Kenneth Langone when Asher's drug activity became known in 1999. Kenneth Langone, former director of the NYSE, also founded ChoicePoint, a rival data mining company.
Asher founded eData before getting canned, in 1998. In 2000, eData tapped Dale H. Renner, former global managing partner of Andersen Consulting's Customer Relationship Management practice, as its President and Chief Executive Officer. eData was renamed Seisint sometime in 1999. After this it's often referrred to Seisint, formerly known as eData or similar language.
ChoicePoint, Langone's company, acquired DBT, Asher's company, in 2000. ChoicePoint, using DBT technology, is associated with the Florida voter fraud debacle in the 2000 president election.
"Accenture [formerly Andersen Consulting] and Seisint Form Strategic Alliance to Help Organizations Unlock the Power of Data" - this is high-tech marketing language to mean that Seisint partnered with the same outfit that brought you Enron. Seisint wanted to grow fast.
THE MATRIX
The same rush to install surveillance that lead to TIA brought Seisint to the government. Seisint hired Giuliani Partners to grease some palms and open some doors. In January 2003 Asher shows the MATRIX technology at the Whitehouse, to a group including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Vice President Cheney, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and soon-to-be-appointed Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. The Federal goverment would provide millions of dollars to Seisint to continue developing the product, which would be implemented at the state level.
MATRIX appears to include a mix of corporate data, court records and other data compiled by private industry, and records provided directly by the states. This information includes property ownership, address history (including all the people an individual has ever lived with), business and corporate information, marine vessels, U.S. directory assistance, public utility services connections, bankruptcies, liens and judgments, UCC filings, FCC pilot information, hunting and fishing licenses, gun licenses, professional licenses, voter registrations, and U.S. domain names. The MATRIX also includes drivers license data from 15 states, criminal offender information from 35 states and court data from parts of 15 states including felony, misdemeanor and traffic violations going back decades.[7]
Those records are apparently only the tip of the iceberg. MATRIX records obtained from Connecticut, Florida and Michigan, claim the ability to access billions of records. This is in addition to all the other government data available from other states such as drivers' license information and criminal offender records.[8]
The federal government has paid more than $9 million to a private company,[9] Seisint, Inc., the sole business of which is to sell and manipulate commercial data. It is impossible to know how much data it has received on private citizens for its money.
http://www.aclu.org/...
In January 2003 Seisint founder Hank Asher showed the MATRIX technology at the Whitehouse, to a group including Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Vice President Cheney, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and soon-to-be-appointed Department of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. The Federal goverment would provide millions of dollars to Seisint to continue developing the product.
Several states signed up to use the MATRIX system, but success was limited. The product would later be discredited and dropped due to poor design and privacy concerns. Additional concerns over Asher's drug-smuggling past also errupted. The states dropped MATRIX one by one; Senators Feingold and Wyden produced bills which blocked the use of mining civilian databases, and the project was cancelled. Seisint was acquired by LexisNexis in 2004.
(An interesting sidenote: Asher has a longstanding history with Kenneth Langone, former chairman of the NYSE and co-founder of ChoicePoint. Langone had been a board member of one of Asher's earlier companies, DBT Online, and had forced Asher out when he learned of the drug history, then sold DBT to ChoicePoint in 2000. ChoicePoint, using DBT technology, is associated with the Florida voter fraud debacle in the 2000 president election. High tech is a small, small, nasty, vicious world. You thought Gates and Jobs had it bad. But I digress...)