A Blip in the MATRIX

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16985

 

A Blip in the MATRIXNancy 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.

 

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

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