Reprinted from http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16985
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A Blip in the MATRIX
By Nancy Kranich, AlterNet
October 16, 2003
Civil libertarians heaved a sigh of relief when Congress voted in late September to end
funding for John Poindexter’s Total (aka Terrorism) Information Awareness (TIA) Program.
But the controversy over this attempt to collect and compile information about the
activities of American citizens may have diverted attention from a similar state-based
program with equally disturbing implications.
Shortly after the attacks of September 11th, law enforcement officials in Florida began
using a TIA-like system called MATRIX, short for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information
Exchange. MATRIX enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events
faster than ever before. Created to enable state and local authorities to track would-be
terrorists as well as criminal fugitives, the database is housed in the offices of a
private Florida-based company, Seisint.
MATRIX was developed by Hank Asher, a wealthy data entrepreneur and founder of Seisint.
According to news reports, Asher called Florida police right after the attacks, claiming
he could pinpoint the hijackers and others who might pose a risk of terrorist activity. He
offered to make this powerful law enforcement database available quickly, for free. Asher,
reportedly a former government informant involved with drug smuggling, resigned from
Seisint at the end of August following a series of critical newspaper reports. These
reports also reminded Florida residents that it was Asher’s former company, Database
Technologies, that administered the contract that stripped thousands of African Americans
from the Florida voter rolls before the 2000 election, erroneously contending that they
were felons.
Initially, Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New
York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Ohio and Utah announced they would participate
with the MATRIX system. California and Texas dropped out, citing privacy and security
concerns. The U.S. Justice Department recently provided $4 million and the Department of
Homeland Security has pledged another $8 million to expand the MATRIX program nationally.
Homeland Security will also provide the computer network for information-sharing among the
states.
MATRIX purports to offer law enforcement officers investigative leads by combining
government-created criminal history, driver license, vehicle registration, and
incarceration/corrections records with a collection of databases containing more than 20
billion records from private sources compiled by Accurint, a Seisint commercial subsidiary
that helps creditors and other interested parties locate debtors. Florida Law Enforcement
officials claim that this data mining technology will save countless investigative hours
and significantly improve the opportunity for successful conclusion of investigations.
Data from MATRIX is transferred through the Regional Information Sharing Systems network
(called riss.net), an existing secure law enforcement network used to transmit sensitive
information among law enforcement agencies, with connectivity for the High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Areas, United States Attorneys' Offices, other federal agencies, and several
state law enforcement systems. According to the Web site, MATRIX secures its databases “in
accordance with restrictions and conditions placed on it by the submitting state, pursuant
to the submitting state's laws and regulations. Information will be made available only to
law enforcement agencies, and on a need-to-know and right-to-know basis.”
Not everyone trusts this promise, however. Civil liberties and privacy groups charge that
MATRIX increases the ability of local police to snoop on individuals because this system
allows searches of criminal and commercial records with amazing ease and speed. As Ari
Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, warns, "It's
going to make fishing expeditions so much more convenient. There's going to be a push to
use it for many different kinds of purposes." According to a September 24 article in the
Houston Chronicle, privacy advocates and government officials have already branded MATRIX
as “playing fast and loose with Americans' private details.” Greg Palast, author of The
Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has alleged that, “now we're creating this massive database
in which American citizens have gone from being the victims to being the suspects.”
Although MATRIX's most obvious threats to civil liberties are in the realms of privacy and
due process, the system also threatens free expression. When police or other government
agencies collect information about citizens' private lives, that information is likely to
include their group associations, political activities, and reading preferences. Whether
an individual joins an anti-war march, contributes to a humanitarian organization, buys
books online about Afghanistan, or works with a church group aiding immigrants should be
of no concern to government. When law enforcement agencies collect and share this sort of
information, it inevitably chills the discourse so essential to democracy.
Like Total Information Awareness, the MATRIX system both profiles and targets Americans
innocent of any wrongdoing by collecting information (and misinformation) on everyone,
much of which can be misused or abused. Florida officials acknowledge that MATRIX can
"monitor innocent citizens." Phil Ramer, special agent in charge of Florida’s statewide
intelligence told a Washington Post reporter in early August that the system could be
intrusive and pledged to use it with restraint. "It's scary. It could be abused. I mean, I
can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors." Ramer and
others claim, however, that Florida police oversight of MATRIX users, along with audits
and background checks on people with access to the database, will prevent unscrupulous
spying. Nevertheless, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement memo obtained by the
Associated Press in late September revealed that background checks on Seisint's staff took
place more than a year into the program, and that a privacy policy governing MATRIX use
has yet to be finalized.
MATRIX utilizes outside contractors who are not subject to the same type of controls
employed by government agencies that share state-based criminal information. Although
records collected by MATRIX were available to law enforcement previously, those that were
private and confidential were restricted by laws and policies requiring proper security
clearances. Florida officials say they will use the system under tight supervision, but
effective oversight and accountability means legislative oversight. With each
participating state collecting and maintaining data based on different standards for
correcting, aggregating and using the data, security and oversight are dispersed without
the checks and balanced of federal government computer systems. So, while many in Congress
are eager to ensure more accountability in how federal law enforcement, intelligence, and
national security agencies are using databases by requiring those agencies to report to
Congress about databases acquired and types of information they contain, as well as
prohibiting hypothetical modeling of people who may commit a crime, who will do the same
for similar multi-state intelligence systems?
No doubt, if the CIA, FBI, and INS had shared and analyzed information they collected
prior to September 11, they may have saved thousands of lives. But developing a
state-based system utilizing criminal records and private data jeopardizes privacy and
other civil liberties without necessarily increasing national or local security. The
state-level MATRIX program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand just when
Congress is denouncing federal data-mining systems. Rather than thwarting these intrusive
systems, public officials are now finding back-door approaches to Poindexter’s Orwellian
dream of total information awareness, only under state, not federal, auspices.
Nancy Kranich is Senior Research Fellow at the Free Expression Policy Project and
previously served as President of the American Library Association.
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