Digital Crime Fight Moves Beyond Terrorism With Linked Data Warehouses
Law enforcement agencies across the country are spending millions of dollars to build data warehouses of domestic intelligence that can be used to fight crime and spot terrorist plots.
The Washington Post reports that the warehouses will hold criminal and investigative information from several thousand police agencies. They will be connected to a federal system known as the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx, which was developed by Raytheon for $85 million.
The new systems “underscore how the use of new data–and data surveillance–technology to fight crime and terrorism is evolving faster than the public’s understanding or the laws intended to check government power and protect civil liberties,” the story says.
The newspaper recounted a demonstration of a commercial data-mining system called Coplink, first introduced in 2002. Tucson detective Cynthia Butierez accessed the system through her Web browser and entered a fake name used by a fraud suspect on a bogus check. The system produced the names of five real people and five incident reports. Then she homed in on one suspect, finding his links to other people and their addresses, providing leads she could follow. At least 1,550 jurisdictions use Coplink.
Thomas Bush III, the FBI’s assistant director of the criminal justice information services division, said the goal of the new N-DEx system is to provide “a one-stop shop” for information. “A guy that’s got a flat tire outside a nuclear facility in one location means nothing,” he told the Post. “Run the guy and he’s had a flat tire outside of five nuclear facilities and you have a clue.”
