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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.
The state-level program, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the nation at a time when Congress has been sharply critical of similar
data-driven systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon plan for global surveillance and an air-passenger-screening system.
Washington Post
[Edited on 6-8-2003 by MiStErBeLLaTrIx]
