SNOOP PROGRAM RETURNS

Everyone at Defense Tech HQ did a lit­tle hat dance after we heard about the demise of MATRIX, the far-​​flung, state-​​run, terrorist-​​profiling data­base. But it looks like we danced too soon.
Officials in Florida — who helped run the orig­i­nal data-​​mining effort — have put out a call for infor­ma­tion for MATRIX II, Defense Tech pal Ryan Singel reports in today’s Wired News. And the sequel looks even more inva­sive than the orig­i­nal Multistate Anti-​​Terrorism Information Exchange.
That sys­tem “allowed law enforce­ment to search a cen­tral­ized data­base pop­u­lated with records col­lected by states — includ­ing crim­i­nal his­tory, driver’s license pho­tos, prop­erty deeds and fish­ing licenses — and bil­lions of com­mer­cial data records,” Ryan writes. To that, MATRIX II’s archi­tects would like to see insur­ance and finan­cial infor­ma­tion added.
That’s a giant red flag, Ryan notes.

Though scores of com­pa­nies sell data-​​mining and search­ing tech­nol­ogy, only ChoicePoint, cur­rently under media and gov­ern­ment scrutiny for allow­ing iden­tity thieves to har­vest hun­dreds of thou­sands of records on Americans, has search tech­nol­ogy and cen­tral­ized insur­ance claim information.

Supposedly, Florida offi­cials need all this infor­ma­tion to fight ter­ror. But of the 1,866,202 orig­i­nal MATRIX searches between July 2003 and April 2005, “less than 3 per­cent were related to ter­ror­ism inves­ti­ga­tions,” Ryan says.
Kinda makes you won­der what they’ll do if MATRIX II ever gets off the ground.

April 25th, 2005 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.