MATRIX is Raising Privacy Concerns

August 10, 2003
By Sun staff writer TIM LOCKETTE

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is putting together a computer network that would allow police to analyze government and commercial records on every Florida resident, and the agency is planning to share that information with police in at least a dozen other states.

Critics say the system - known as the Multistate Anti-Terrorist Information Exchange, or MATRIX - is an Orwellian technology that would allow police to assemble electronic dossiers on every Floridian, even those not suspected of crimes.

Law enforcement officials say MATRIX will simply speed up criminal investigations by allowing police to perform quicker searches of information that is already publicly available in government records and commercial databases.

But they aren't offering many details on the types of commercial records the system would be able to search.

"I can tell you that it's all public information," FDLE spokeswoman Jennie Khoen said. "We'll have public records from agencies like the property appraiser's office, the county clerk, the sexual predator database, and some private sector information."

Conceived in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, MATRIX is intended to allow law enforcement agencies to search for and share information that could lead them to people suspected of terrorist activity or other criminal acts.

Asked for an example of the system in action, Khoen cited a hypothetical situation in which a child is abducted and witnesses have only a description of the kidnapper, the make of his car and a partial license plate number. MATRIX could almost instantly pull up a list of potential suspects, Khoen said, possibly trimming hours off the search for the kidnapper.

The project is funded by a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, and organizers expect another $8 million from the Department of Homeland Security. Twelve other states have signed up to add their records to the MATRIX database.

One organizer of the system said MATRIX would "primarily" contain information from government records such as tax forms, driver's license information and criminal backgrounds. It also would include "commercially available" material, including credit applications and credit reports, Khoen said.

But FDLE officials remain tight-lipped about other "commercially available" sources MATRIX might use. And in the age of Internet marketing - when companies routinely collect and sell information about their customers - that has civil liberties advocates worried.

"What does 'commercially available' mean?" asked Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. "Are they going to look at what I buy on my credit card? Are they going to look at what I check out at Blockbuster? Who knows?"

Simon said MATRIX would effectively create "law enforcement dossiers" on every Floridian, whether or not they're suspected of a crime.

"This is a program the East German secret police would have loved," Simon said. "With modern technology, we now have the capability to put everybody under surveillance."

A similar program? he MATRIX debate comes weeks after Congress effectively crippled a Pentagon plan to assemble a "grand database" of personal information about everyone in America. Pentagon researchers planned to use pattern recognition software to detect transactions that might indicate someone is planning a terrorist attack.

That program - first known as Total Information Awareness and later as Terrorist Information Awareness - drew cries of protest from privacy and civil liberties advocates, some of whom compared it to the system of surveillance in George Orwell's novel "1984." In July, the Senate voted to block all funding for the $20 million project.

"I'm very suspicious of anything like this," said Ralph Selfridge, member and former president of the ACLU's Gainesville chapter. "This (MATRIX) looks like an attempt to bring back Total Awareness by other means."

FDLE's Khoen said MATRIX differs from the Pentagon program in that it doesn't include "data mining" - the process that allows police to search the database for predictors of future terrorist attack.

Organizers also say MATRIX isn't the same as compiling a dossier on every individual Floridian. Instead, they compare it to a search engine that can assemble a collection of data when asked - just like the search engines and online research services that allow average citizens to snoop on their neighbors.

"Everybody makes this out to be more than it is," said Clay Jester, MATRIX program director for the Institute for Intergovernmental Research, a nonprofit group that is helping FDLE find grant money to fund the system.

"Really, this isn't very different from doing a Lexis-Nexis search on someone," he said.

Tim Lockette can be reached at 374-5088 or lockett@gvillesun.com.

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