U.S. Backs Florida's New Counterterrorism Database

Police in Florida are creating a counterterrorism database designed to give law enforcement agencies around the country a powerful new tool to analyze billions of records about both criminals and ordinary Americans.

Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.

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Some civil liberties groups fear Matrix will dramatically lower the threshold for government snooping because other systems don't allow searches of criminal and commercial records with such ease or speed.

"It's going to make fishing expeditions so much more convenient," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that monitors privacy issues. "There's going to be a push to use it for many different kinds of purposes."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21872-2003Aug5.html

"A Justice Department document from early this year describes Matrix as an effort "to increase and enhance the exchange of sensitive terrorism and other criminal activity information between local, state and federal law enforcement agencies." Matrix organizers met several times with Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), while he was head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to discuss the system's development."

No other mention of Graham or his opinion of the system in the article.

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