Torch Concepts

Immediately after 9/11, the US government bought data from data brokers, including air passenger data from Torch Concepts and a database of Mexican voters from ChoicePoint. US law requires financial institutions to report cash transactions of $10,000 or larger to the government; for currency exchangers ...

For example, in 2002 officials from the Transportation Security Administration asked JetBlue Airways to provide detailed passenger information to Torch Concepts, a company in Huntsville, AL, that was developing a data mining system even more invasive than the one envisioned by DARPA. JetBlue was ...

Take, for example, what happened in 2002 when a now-defunct information-mining company and Department of Defense contractor called Torch Concepts got five million itinerary records for JetBlue passengers—records that included names, addresses and phone numbers—for a project whose goal was ...

Last year, JetBlue Airways acknowledged that it secretly gave defense contractor Torch Concepts 5 million passenger itineraries for a government project on passenger profiling without the consent of the passengers. The contractor augmented the data with passengers' Social Security numbers, income ...

Torch Concepts, the SRS subcontractor that worked on the project, “worked directly with the Army and had a specific mandate to ferret information out of data stream [to find the] abnormal behavior of secretive people,” said SRS's Bart Edsall in an interview with Wired News. Privacy advocates immediately ...