Lockheed Martin has been awarded the contract to organize and monitor the upcoming Canadian census. This article informs the reader of some of the privacy issues ivolved in allowing an international company to aquire personal data about Canadians.

I wrote a letter to the Honourable Allan Rock today. I've never spoken to or written to any political official in my life. Something about this one though just made me so...

According to the Globe and Mail, (Canada at risk...Oct,14 2003 pg.4) the Canadian subsidiary of aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Corp. has won a multimillion dollar contract to provide technological support for a 2004 census dress rehearsal. If successful, the group which includes IBM is set to receive a contract for the actual nationwide Canadian census in 2006. This agreement marks the first time a multinational firm has been involved in this country's census process.

I was vaguely familiar with the name of Lockheed Martin so I decided to do some digging. I found out that not only are they an 'aerospace giant' in Canada but the corporation is active in other enterprises. I found this article.

Lockheed Martin is the world's largest weapons contractor. The company received $17 billion in contracts from the Pentagon in fiscal year 2002, plus almost $2 billion for nuclear weapons design work from the Department of Energy. In the lead up to the war in Iraq, the company boasted a 36% jump in profits, with a 15% increase in military aircraft sales alone.

Lockheed Martin's significant global presence stems from its role as the world's largest arms exporting company. Its most lucrative export item is the F-16 combat aircraft, with more than 3,000 sold overseas since the mid-1970s. The company also makes the Hellfire missile, "bunker buster" munitions and the massive C-130 transport plane.

In late 2001, the company won what has been touted as "the largest defense contract in history," a $19 billion development contract for the $200 billion Joint Strike Fighter program. Plans call for producing variants of the JSF for the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines, as well as for the Navy and Air Force of the United Kingdom.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/updates/051603.html

I did further digging and found that Lockheed is quite versatile.

New Report on the Privatization of Welfare
Oakland, CA. Welfare reform in 1996 promised that by turning social services over to private companies, government inefficiency would be overcome and services delivered better and cheaper. Is the privatization of welfare delivering on those promises? Have private companies transformed the old system into a suite of services leading to decent-paying, long-term employment for former welfare recipients? Preliminary results are in and the news is not good, according to a new report, Prospecting Among the Poor: Welfare Privatization, released by the Applied Research Center.

Far too often, corporations such as Maximus Inc. and Lockheed Martin, who have won contracts to manage welfare-to-work incentives, training programs, and treatment for people with substance abuse problems "underbid, over promised and … didn’t deliver." Job training and support services simply aren’t there for too many of those who need them.

In order to win contracts, according to author Bill Berkowitz, "companies like Maximus and Lockheed Martin blithely spend monies from other jurisdictions to wine, dine, and pay off decision-makers." Meanwhile, as in the case of Curtis and Associates, "staff working for private companies have neither the credentials nor the training to handle their caseloads. Consequently, clients do not receive services they need, and to which they are entitled, such as childcare and transportation subsidies and medical care."

The study uncovers the proliferation of profiteering scams and corporate failures whose costs ultimately come out of the hides of welfare recipients and taxpayers.
http://www.arc.org/welfare/prospecting_nr.html

Why was it all so intriguing? I recalled from memory an event from the recent past...

BMO scours runaway servers for possible data leaks
A pair of servers belonging to the Bank of Montreal that wound up in the public domain through a recycling program contained databases holding employee and possibly customer information, the bank confirmed Monday.

The Bank of Montreal was still working with the company that manages its hardware assets, Rider Computer Services Ltd., to learn exactly what is on the databases at press time. The recovery process was hindered by the fact that the servers ran on an older operating system, a BMO spokesman said, but some employee information has already turned up.

"If it's all employee information, then we have a very effective system of informing all our employees directly," said Ian Blair. "If it's customer information we'll be looking at the most practical and most efficient way to inform them as well. But at this stage -- and we're quite confident in this now -- no information was compromised and no accounts were compromised."

News of the security breach came to light after the reseller who bought the IBM Netfinity servers from Rider subsidiary Ecosys Canada posted them for auction on eBay. After turning one of the servers on, the reseller told the Toronto Star he was able to access hundreds of BMO customer records without using a password. The servers, whose hard drives should have been scrubbed before they were resold, have since been returned to the bank. Rider told the Star the computers were simply taken from the wrong skid in the warehouse.
http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&sid=53443

Now if you're like me and you don't care that 'the man' knows what kind of shampoo you use, consider this.

Lockheed as seen above has resources and connections with powerful organizations within the American government. These connections enable Lockheed to use their sociological research and resources to implement a work-for-welfare program in the town or state of their customers. The customers are the publicly elected offices who are representing the public. So why was the public not in on the decision? Why were we not consulted about Lockheeds bid to organize our census? Because we have elected officials to do that for us you might say. Fair enough.

From an ethical perspective we should not have the world’s largest weapons contractor with a specialized branch dedicated to determining the most profitable way to organize the systems of work-for welfare compile our census data. Could we not find a Canadian company bound by the laws of Canada to award the contract to? Whatever stance you may have on the implications of work-for welfare, or on any wars of the world you must acknowledge that in order to create profit you must know HOW to. In the case of work-for-welfare it is about an ultimatum. Here’s another. If your country is at war and your government discovers scientifically that parents would rather fight on the front lines than watch their children die, do you then offer an ultimatum to the parents as to what they would rather happen? How would you use this information? Do I care that Lockheed Martin will have information about me from my census? Do I who before today never wrote a letter to a political official in my life have the resources to hold Lockheed accountable for the security of that information?

In Canada we have privacy laws that are outlined in the Privacy Act.

Purpose of the Privacy Act:

“An Act to extend the present laws of Canada that protect the privacy of individuals and that provide individuals with a right of access to personal information about themselves.