05/02/05

LC050502

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

He'd never heard of ChoicePoint until he got this letter.

Travis Salladay>> "We have reason to believe your personal
information may have been obtained by unauthorized third parties
and we deeply regret any inconvenience this event may cause
you." Twenty-five years down the drain of trying to do
everything right to protect myself.

Val>> And then, preserving the colors of Los Angeles. A major
effort is underway to save the city's freeway murals.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Question: what is the fastest growing crime in America?
Hint: calling 9-1-1 won't do you any good. It is identity theft
and now criminals are much more sophisticated. Instead of just
ripping off credit card numbers, they're breaking into massive
computerized databases like ChoicePoint that has sensitive
information on millions of Americans. Kevin Smith brings us a
story of one man who didn't even know he was a victim until he
got a letter.

Kevin Smith>> For years, Travis Salladay has gone to great
lengths to protect his privacy. He shreds his documents. He no
longer gets bank and credit card statements through the mail.

Travis Salladay>> I open the mail and I see these two letters.

Kevin Smith>> So just imagine how shocked Travis was when he
and his wife received this letter from a company called
ChoicePoint.

Travis Salladay>> "We have reason to believe your personal
information may have been obtained by unauthorized third parties
and we deeply regret any inconvenience this event may cause
you." Twenty-five years down the drain of trying to do
everything right to protect myself.

Kevin Smith>> His reaction?

Travis Salladay>> First there was sickness in the stomach.
Then I started to get angry.

Kevin Smith>> Just what is ChoicePoint? That's what thirty-
five thousand Californians who got these letters wanted to know
because most had never heard of the Georgia company.
ChoicePoint is called a data aggregator. It collects all kinds
of information about you and sells it to clients who may want
information about you, like law enforcement agencies, apartment
leasing agents and potential employers.

Jay Foley>> You call them data aggregators. I call them
dossier companies. What they're doing is they're building a
profile dossier about every citizen that they can.

Kevin Smith>> Jay Foley and his wife run the Identity Theft
Resource Center, a prominent online clearinghouse to help
victims. The ChoicePoint mess appalled him.

Jay Foley>> A group of Nigerian thieves impersonated somewhere
between twenty-five and fifty companies utilizing stolen
identification and they were able to dupe ChoicePoint out of
hundreds of thousands of records.

Kevin Smith>> Pretending to be legitimate businesses, the
criminals used a Copymat in Hollywood to fax their applications
for access to ChoicePoint's database. Without checking further,
ChoicePoint allowed the crooks to obtain at least 145,000
personal data files nationwide.

Travis Salladay>> I don't know. Somebody made the decision to
be selling this stuff and evidently it was over a fax machine.
A fax machine? This is where -- you know, how did they know who
these people are?

Kevin Smith>> Travis and most of the other victims don't yet
know if they've suffered any actual financial losses.

Travis Salladay>> I don't know if that will ever occur. I have
no idea. See, this is the problem. Once your data is out
there, it's out there for the whole world and it's probably
going to be sold time and time again.

Kevin Smith>> Once ChoicePoint finally became suspicious,
authorities lured this Nigerian national back to the Copymat and
arrested him. He pleaded guilty and is serving a sixteen-month
sentence. The investigation is continuing into possible
accomplices. Travis Salladay is horrified that his privacy was
breached, even though he had no customer relationship with
ChoicePoint and didn't know he was in its database.

Travis Salladay>> Why is my social security number being sold?
I should be able to opt out of this information being out there,
period.

Kevin Smith>> And it's not just ChoicePoint. A few weeks
later, another big data aggregator, LexisNexis, notified 32,000
people that criminals accessed their private information.

Lieutenant Robert "Rocky" Costa>> They're personal computers,
in most cases.

Kevin Smith>> Sheriff's Department Lieutenant Rocky Costa is
with the Southern California high-tech task force which led the
ChoicePoint investigation. He supports proposed laws that would
make data aggregators check out customers thoroughly before
selling them information.

Lieutenant Robert "Rocky" Costa>> We have operated business in
this country on an honor system. I take you at your word and I
take you at the documentation that you produce. Business has to
change and, yes, it's not going to be convenient. It's not
going to be practical to do onsite visits, to ask for references
from other companies, but we need to change the way we do
business in this country.

Kevin Smith>> More conventional types of identity theft crimes
are also rising rapidly. Just by coincidence while working on
this story, I received a classic identity theft fisching scam in
my e-mail. The sender appears to be service@amazon.com, but
when you click on it, one thing to look for right away is to see
if there is bad grammar, a tip-off that it's not the real
company that you think it is. This one says "Our new security
system will help you avoid frequently fraud transactions and to
keep your orders safety." If you click on the link, it looks
like an authentic Amazon.com web page. Up here on the URL,
which is the web address of the company, you notice it does not
say Amazon.com, but mmm2.net, again a totally bogus website.
They're asking for all your credit card information, supposedly
to update your Amazon.com account, but it's really a scam. They
are fisching for your private credit card information.

Lieutenant Robert "Rocky" Costa>> This is a case where a guy
used the identity of another person.

Kevin Smith>> Many victims complain that they can't get the
attention of police and prosecutors. But so many cases are
reported, Costa says they can only focus on those with the most
impact.

Lieutenant Robert "Rocky" Costa>> We generally will use a
dollar amount. If the dollar amount exceeds ten thousand
dollars, is what we're using, or frequency. If the suspect is
frequently impacting that victim, then we know they're active.

Kevin Smith>> The Identity Theft Resource Center's Jay Foley
took us on a tour of some of the common hazards awaiting
consumers. He explained how waiters in restaurants use
electronic skimmers the size of pagers to steal credit card
information.

Jay Foley>> All it takes is for the waiter to have a small
device in his pocket, slightly smaller than this, run your
credit card through it, and he's just stored electronically all
the information off of your credit card.

Kevin Smith>> So what does Foley recommend?

Jay Foley>> Get up and walk to the cashier with the waiter, let
him run your credit card, take care of it that way, then walk
back to the table to your guests.

Kevin Smith>> Crooks also install skimmers at ATMs which read
your bank account information as you use the machine.

Jay Foley>> When you come up here, feel it. Put your fingers
down. If it extends out, wiggle it a little bit. If it falls
off, don't stick your ATM card in there. What's happened is
that somebody has mounted a skimmer on the front of your ATM
slide-in device. Somewhere else around the ATM, there's going
to be a little camera that's watching you so that, when you type
in your pin number, it stores that.

Kevin Smith>> Foley recommends using credit cards instead of
debit or check cards which take money for purchases right out of
your bank account.

Jay Foley>> With debit cards, the money goes out of your
account. You've got to argue to get it back. With credit
cards, they've got to argue with you to get the money out of
you. Which would you rather argue about?

Kevin Smith>> Another hot area is so-called criminal identity
theft. When police pull somebody over for a violation and the
offender pretends to be you, you're the one who winds up with
the criminal record.

Lieutenant Robert "Rocky" Costa>> The end result is, of course,
the criminal is not going to show up to court on the day of the
appearance on that citation and ultimately a warrant will be
issued for the actual person whose name that is.

Travis Salladay>> It's never going to be the same. It's just
never going to be the same.

Kevin Smith>> Meanwhile, Travis Salladay has joined a class
action lawsuit against ChoicePoint. He fears he may still
suffer financial harm. For Travis and other ChoicePoint
victims, the proposed new laws to force data aggregators to
improve security will come a day late and perhaps many dollars
short. I'm Kevin Smith for Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and
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Toni Guinyard>> A big step has been taken to providing quality
preschool to every four year old in Los Angeles County. It's
part of the Los Angeles universal preschool system. We spoke
with Rob Reiner who explained why he believes this is one step
that we need to take.

[Film Clip]

Rob Reiner>> It's probably the most important time in a child's
life before they enter the K through twelve system in which
they're learning. They're learning about how to play with
others, how to integrate with other kids and they're learning
the beginning of learning numbers and colors and letters. It's
the thing that levels the playing field, that makes kids, when
they enter kindergarten, gives them a chance to succeed.

There was a huge article about drop-out rates particularly in
the Latino and African-American communities. We know, based on
all the longitudinal studies that have been done on preschool,
if a child gets good quality preschool at four years old, that
child is way less likely to drop out, way more likely to go on
to college, way less likely to become a crime statistic and, on
average, makes $150,000 over the course of a lifetime. So it is
the single best investment we can make in our kids to not only
do better in school and later on in life, but to cut crime,
improve the workforce and thereby improve our economy. The
single best investment we can make.

Toni Guinyard>> You know there are critics out there who say,
wait a minute, these kids are too young to be in a structured
learning environment.

Rob Reiner>> Well, but all the studies, all the scientific
evidence, shows that not to be true. I mean, we're not talking
about kids taking tests or flash cards or anything like that.
We're talking about introducing them into an environment with
other children where they're learning by playing.

[Film Clip]

Rob Reiner>> They learn those social skills. Their emotional
and social development happens in this kind of structured
environment and, there's no question about it, they do way
better in school than the kids that don't get preschool. It
definitely levels the playing field.

[Film Clip]

Rob Reiner>> It's not just for under-privileged children or
children at risk. We're starting with the school districts that
are the lowest performing because that's where the greatest need
is. But the design here is to have preschool delivered to every
four year old in Los Angeles County and that could be up to a
hundred thousand children in the next number of years.

[Film Clip]

Rob Reiner>> What I say to the taxpayer is that it's the single
best investment and return on your dollar. Studies show between
the studies where universal programs, for the most at-risk
programs, anywhere from three to seventeen dollars comes back
for every dollar you invest in a child in preschool in reduced
crime costs, reduced remedial education costs, reduced welfare
costs, increased tax revenue. It's the single best investment
they can make.

Toni Guinyard>> Do you think this will provide the voters a
chance to see where their money is going?

Rob Reiner>> Yes, I do think. I think, you know, First 5 has
done some very, very big things throughout the state over the
last few years. We've delivered health care for every child up
to age eighteen in five Bay Area counties, here also in Los
Angeles County. We're delivering preschool here in Los Angeles
County, four other counties and up to eighteen in the future, so
we're doing some very, very big things. Are we perfect? No.
Have there been missed opportunities? Yes. Have there been
mistakes? Yes. And we've gone a good way to make sure that
those mistakes get corrected.

There is legislation right now that's working its way through
the legislature to strengthen First 5, AB 109, Wilma Chan's
bill. I'm totally supportive of it, worked with her on it and
we're going to do everything because it's important to me. You
know, it seems like a lot of money, six hundred million dollars
a year that comes to First 5, but in the state of California
with thirty-five million people and five hundred thousand
children born every year, it's small compared to what the needs
are of a state this size. So I've got to make sure that every
dollar, every penny, is spent the right way because this is part
of a movement.

We have to get people focused on investing in young children and
get the programs up and running so that somewhere down the road
because part of our mandate is to reduce smoking. We're doing
that too, so we've got a diminishing fund extreme. So we've got
to put these programs in place, get the public bought in to
understanding how critical it is to invest in young children and
then, at a certain point, people will want to perpetuate these
programs and continue on. I've actually helped create some
legislation which hopefully will be on the June ballot next year
which will provide preschool for every four year old in
California.

Toni Guinyard>> Why are you so passionate about this? It would
be so easy for you to sit back and not deal with all of this.
Why?

Rob Reiner>> You know, I've been active my whole life
politically in one way or another, always thinking about where
can I make a difference? What role can I play to make things
better? When I started to understand about the correlation
between investing in young children and social outcomes and
reducing crime, fixing the school system, changing the economy,
and I realized that this small investment can have such a major
impact on all these other things and that nobody was really
talking about early childhood, nobody was putting a focus on it,
I said, wait a minute, I'm seeing all these studies.

If you put this money in the early years and you get such a huge
return later on and attacking the problems that we're all trying
to wrestle with, to strengthening the economy, the school
system, fighting crime, teen pregnancies, drug abuse, child
abuse, all of these social ills that we care about and we see
the nexus between investing in these kids early on, it has a
major impact on these things. I said this is what I need to
talk about because nobody else has been talking about that very
much until I got involved in this about ten years ago.

So being somebody who's been politically active and being civic-
minded, I said, okay, here's a role I can play. I can tell
people about something that they may not know about and start
the dialog about really making this investment. You cannot
mandate a parent to force a child to go to preschool. It has to
be voluntary. The first five years of a child's life are the
most critical and the parent is the first teacher. The parent
is the one who is responsible for that child and we have to let
the parent decide what's best for that child. We believe that,
if we present high-quality preschool programs and we educate
parents as to how great it is for their kids and how great they
will do in school as they go, we will see a huge uptake on this.
We can't force people, but we can certainly show them the wisdom
of doing it and I think we will get a huge uptake on this.

[Film Clip]

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Val>> Murals may be painted on concrete, but just like
wallpaper, they can age. And Los Angeles's murals have plenty
of enemies, sun, pollution, earthquakes and cracks and, of
course, graffiti. But as Vicki Curry tells us, there is an
ongoing effort to make sure that Los Angeles's rich mural
heritage doesn't fade away.

Vicki Curry>> They're so much a part of the Los Angeles
landscape that they blend in with the palm trees and skyscrapers
of urban life, vast and vibrant murals adorning scores of
neighborhoods, turning walls, bridges and freeways into an
ongoing canvas of color.

Pat Gomez>> We estimate there are over two thousand murals in
the city of Los Angeles. There's this enormous, wonderful art
form in the city. Many of the world-renowned muralists are
working here in Los Angeles, so they really are cultural
treasures and they become icons in the community.

Vicki Curry>> It all began with the Chicano murals of East Los
Angeles inspired by the likes of Diego Rivera and David Alfaro
Siqueiros. Within the art, there was always a political
statement.

Pat Gomez>> It's such a wonderful, democratic art form. I
mean, with the murals, it creates galleries in the streets where
the words reflect important events, thoughts, movements. Pretty
much everything that is going on in a very, very dynamic city,
you will see in some mural or another on the streets of Los
Angeles. Everything is reflected on the walls.

Vicki Curry>> Now Los Angeles's murals are in trouble. Even a
drive-by observation shows how years of exposure have taken
their toll.

Jerry Podany>> It's very difficult to protect public works of
art and still have them visibly and physically accessible to the
public, so they suffer a great deal.

Vicki Curry>> The murals are hurt by the very things that make
Southern California unique. Sunlight breaks down and fades the
colors. Seismic jolts lead to cracks and water damage. Many
artists don't have the money or experience to prepare the wall
or use the best materials, but the biggest enemy is graffiti.

Nathan Zackheim>> People come and intentionally destroy murals
and they do that more than they ever have. They used to respect
them, but now they don't respect them because of the zero
tolerance. They know or they suspect that a mural or a work of
art will not be painted out as quickly as the tags on a regular
concrete surface, so they zero in there because the whole game
of tagging, apparently, is to see how long your tag stays up.

Vicki Curry>> When tagging became a problem, the city often
responded by just painting over the graffiti even if it meant
painting over the mural.

Chris Stavroudis>> Any paint on top of a mural that's not
properly protected is inherently difficult to remove. The
murals done in acrylic paint are basically the same chemical as
the paint that's been put over top or the graffiti, so
separating the two is problematic, when it's even possible, and
usually there is some damage done to the original in the
process.

Vicki Curry>> Lately, the city has started trying to save the
murals. The effort includes a $1.7 million dollar project
funded by Caltrans to restore freeway murals, but often it's too
little too late.

Donna Williams>> You know, if you drive your car around for ten
years and you don't bother to wash or wax it, I think we all
know what it will look like. To some degree, I think that's a
problem with public art is that it's neglected. It's becoming
more of a part of city budgets, but in the past, a lot of these
murals have been put up without any kind of endowment for their
future care.

Vicki Curry>> But this new crusade is raising questions. Who's
responsible for maintaining a mural and what's involved?

Jerry Podany>> To clean them and to patch them goes a very long
way in long-term preservation of these objects and certainly
makes a lot more economic sense than waiting thirty years or
until the mural looks absolutely horrible and then assuming we
can restore it back to its original state.

Vicki Curry>> Some experts say that no mural was meant to last
forever. By the very nature of the art form, it's meant to be
temporary.

Jerry Podany>> A mural can disappear within a year if there is
some catastrophic failure or natural disaster or it can outlast
all of us if it's properly cared for, so there really isn't a
particular amount of time that one can assign.

Chris Stavroudis>> In a way, they are not permanent. The
materials simply won't hold up. Buildings are torn down.
Certainly if a mural is either resonant with the communities
strongly enough, it becomes a work of art or if, just by chance
it survives long enough intact, it becomes important just
because it survived.

Vicki Curry>> But there's a growing belief that modern
technology can make a mural stronger and able to survive much
longer.

Nathan Zackheim>> It's an inexpensive treatment and that mural
could last -- don't laugh, promise? -- fifty years? A hundred
years? Two hundred years? Five hundred years? Two thousand
years? Why not?

Vicki Curry>> For the moment, they are slices of the Los
Angeles landscape that are in dire need of help. That work is
usually done by an art conservator, but conservation is very
different from restoration. Conserving means saving as much of
the original painting and materials as possible. Restoring can
be done with just a fresh coat of paint.

Jerry Podany>> There's always that temptation to say this is
part of our community. We want it to look good. It's cracking.
It's peeling. Why not just come in and repaint it? Why not
make it anew again? Why not touch it up in certain areas or
completely repaint it? The difficulty, of course, is that this
is a unique work of art created at a certain moment in time.
Changing it changes that moment in time, so we lose a certain
amount of historical value of the object.

Vicki Curry>> Traditional conservation methods don't apply to
outdoor art and, when the damage is extreme, experts have
struggled to find solutions.

Chris Stavroudis>> The way we're cleaning these is to glue on a
piece of canvas as part of the mural. When it dries, rip it off
and basically split the paint.

Nathan Zackheim>> When we started to take them off the wall, we
found that they were disintegrating. They were painted on
butcher paper many years ago. So we peeled them off the wall by
adding water behind them and just rolling them off the wall on
pieces of plastic PVC pipe.

Vicki Curry>> None of these techniques could have been used
without the consent of the artist.

Chris Stavroudis>> If the artist says it's okay, it's fine.
But without the artist's approval, this kind of a treatment
couldn't be tolerated. It would be vandalism.

Vicki Curry>> Which is why many artists are actively involved
in restoration. Willie Herron has previously worked on his own
to maintain his murals.

Willie Herron III>> I just became very knowledgeable on how to
do it and still preserve my natural brush stroke from, let's
say, the late sixties and the early seventies. I kind of share
the conservator's perspective that it's a more important work of
art to preserve it and conserve it the way it was originally
painted. It is my own work of art and it's nice to see the
layers come off and to see that my piece is still underneath it
all. It's a great feeling.

Vicki Curry>> Regardless of their condition, the murals of Los
Angeles are part of the city's fabric and conservationists say
that it's a part of urban life worthy of saving.

Pat Gomez>> In years from now, people will look at this as
these were descendants of the city, so it really is ensuring
that this form and these works which are so important as art
works are going to be around for people to enjoy.

Val>> The city has taken an important step in maintaining these
murals. They've created a computer databank of all the murals
in the city, including information on the artists and the
materials used to paint them, and that's very important when it
comes to maintaining or repairing these works of art. And
that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and
Times, thanks for watching.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

Organized labor is organizing for a fight. They're taking on
the governor of California.

>> Come on, Schwarzenegger. What are you doing? This is not
the box office. You can't play with our lives.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.