Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Why do New York and Wisconsin hate America?

New York and Wisconsin have joined the list of states that have pulled out of an anti-crime database program that civil libertarians say endangers citizens' privacy rights. Just five states now remain involved in Matrix out of more than a dozen that had signed up to share criminal, prison and vehicle information with one another and cross-reference the data with privately held databases. [...] Known formally as Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, Matrix links government records with up to 20 billion records in databases held by Seisint Inc., a private company based in Boca Raton, Fla. The Seisint records include details on property, boats and Internet domain names that people own, their address history, utility connections, bankruptcies, liens and business filings, according to an August report by the Georgia state Office of Homeland Security. Officials with Seisint and the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately return calls seeking comment. The American Civil Liberties Union has complained that Matrix could be used by state and federal investigators to compile dossiers on people who have never been suspected of a crime. Seisint officials have said safeguards are built into the system to prevent such abuses.

For the record, the five states remaining in the program are Florida, Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The states which have left or declined to join after actively considering it are Alabama, California, Colorado, Georgia, Louisiana, Kentucky, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The Matrix is an offshoot of the Total Information Awareness, an Orwellian program shut down by Congress in 2002.

The Matrix Web site
states that the data compiled will include criminal histories, driver's
license data, vehicle registration records, and significant amounts of
public data record entries. Company officials have refused to disclose
more specific details about the nature and sources of the data.
According to news reports, the data may also include credit histories,
driver's license photographs, marriage and divorce records, Social
Security numbers, dates of birth, and the names and addresses of family
members, neighbors and business associates. This is some scary shit.
Hopefully the remaining five states will come to their collective
senses and withdraw from the program. If you live in a state where the
Matrix is being actively employed, you'd better hope you don't get
caught by a glitch in the Matrix:

Even beyond the very serious privacy issues with the
Matrix, there is the important risk of so-called false positives. "Data
anomalies" are far from certain indicators of guilt. The data itself
may be in error. As anyone who has ever tried to correct an erroneous
credit report may have found, it's not easy to stop an error once it
gets into the system. Yet there has been no account of how errors in
the Matrix databases can be located and corrected. Or the data may look
bad, but have an innocent explanation. Terrorists are said to be
transients, moving frequently, with few fixed addresses. But students,
poor people, and the homeless do the same. For that matter, so do
travel writers. The truth is that judgments about reasonable suspicion
of criminal activity are fundamentally human judgments that cannot now
-- and, perhaps, ever -- be made accurately by computers. As if all
this weren't bad enough -- and it is-- the Matrix lacks safeguards
against these predictable problems. The Web site states that "[t]his
system will ensure that state and local law enforcement officers -- the
individuals most likely to come into direct contact with terrorists or
other criminals -- have the best information (accurate and complete)
available to them in a timely manner." Despite the promise of accuracy,
it does not have an error correction system, at least not one that has
been explained to the public. And it does not make clear how, if at
all, it will protect privacy.

"Are you with us or against us?!?"

Posted by flow Frazao on March 12, 2004 at 11:11 AM | Permalink