[News] National Dragnet Is a Click Away

[Anti-Imperialist News]

washingtonpost.com

National Dragnet Is a Click Away
Authorities to Gain Fast and Expansive Access to Records

By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 6, 2008; A01

Several thousand law enforcement agencies are creating the foundation 
of a domestic intelligence system through computer networks that 
analyze vast amounts of police information to fight crime and root 
out terror plots.

As federal authorities struggled to meet information-sharing mandates 
after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, police agencies from 
Alaska and California to the Washington region poured millions of 
criminal and investigative records into shared digital repositories 
called data warehouses, giving investigators and analysts new power 
to discern links among people, patterns of behavior and other hidden clues.

Those network efforts will begin expanding further this month, as 
some local and state agencies connect to a fledgling Justice 
Department system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. 
Federal authorities hope N-DEx will become what one called a 
"one-stop shop" enabling federal law enforcement, counterterrorism 
and intelligence analysts to automatically examine the enormous 
caches of local and state records for the first time.

Although Americans have become accustomed to seeing dazzling examples 
of fictional crime-busting gear on television and in movies, law 
enforcement's search for clues has in reality involved a mundane mix 
of disjointed computers, legwork and luck.

These new systems are transforming that process. "It's going from the 
horse-and-buggy days to the space age, that's what it's like," said 
Sgt. Chuck Violette of the Tucson police department, one of almost 
1,600 law enforcement agencies that uses a commercial data-mining 
system called Coplink.

With Coplink, police investigators can pinpoint suspects by searching 
on scraps of information such as nicknames, height, weight, color of 
hair and the placement of a tattoo. They can find hidden 
relationships among suspects and instantly map links among people, 
places and events. Searches that might have taken weeks or months -- 
or which might not have been attempted, because of the amount of 
paper and analysis involved -- are now done in seconds.

On one recent day, Tucson detective Cynthia Butierez demonstrated 
that power in an office littered with paper and boxes of equipment. 
Using a regular desktop computer and Web browser, she logged onto 
Coplink to search for clues about a fraud suspect. She entered a name 
the suspect used on a bogus check. A second later, a list of real 
names came up, along with five incident reports.

She told the system to also search data warehouses built by Coplink 
in San Diego and Orange County, Calif. -- which have agreements to 
share with Tucson -- and came up with the name of a particular 
suspect, his age and a possible address. She asked the software to 
find the suspect's links to other people and incidents, and then to 
create a visual chart displaying the findings. Up popped a display 
with the suspect at the center and cartoon-like images of houses, 
buildings and people arrayed around him. A final click on one of the 
houses brought up the address of an apartment and several new names, 
leads she could follow.

"The power behind what we have discovered, what we can do with 
Coplink, is immense," Tucson police Chief Richard Miranda said. "The 
kinds of things you saw in the movies then, we're actually doing now."
Intelligence-Led Policing

The expanding police systems illustrate the prominent roles that 
private companies play in homeland security and counterterrorism 
efforts. They also 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, authorities said.

Three decades ago, Congress imposed limits on domestic intelligence 
activity after revelations that the FBI, Army, local police and 
others had misused their authority for years to build troves of 
personal dossiers and monitor political activists and other 
law-abiding Americans.

Since those reforms, police and federal authorities have observed a 
wall between law enforcement information-gathering, relating to 
crimes and prosecutions, and more open-ended intelligence that 
relates to national security and counterterrorism. That wall is fast 
eroding following the passage of laws expanding surveillance 
authorities, the push for information-sharing networks, and the 
expectation that local and state police will play larger roles as 
national security sentinels.

Law enforcement and federal security authorities said these 
developments, along with a new willingness by police to share 
information, hold out the promise of fulfilling post-Sept. 11, 2001, 
mandates to connect the dots and root out signs of threats before 
attacks can occur.

"A guy that's got a flat tire outside a nuclear facility in one 
location means nothing," said Thomas E. Bush III, the FBI's assistant 
director of the criminal justice information services division. "Run 
the guy and he's had a flat tire outside of five nuclear facilities 
and you have a clue."

In a paper called "Intelligence-Led Policing: The New Intelligence 
Architecture," law enforcement authorities working with the Justice 
Department said officers " 'on the beat' are an excellent resource 
for gathering information on all kinds of potential threats and 
vulnerabilities."

"Despite the many definitions of 'intelligence' that have been 
promulgated over the years, the simplest and clearest of these is 
'information plus analysis equals intelligence,' " the paper said.

Efforts by federal authorities to create national networks have had 
mixed success.

The federal government has long successfully operated programs such 
as the Regional Information Sharing System, which enables law 
enforcement agencies to communicate, and the National Crime 
Information Center, an index of criminal justice information that 
police across the country can access. Though successful, those 
systems offer a relatively limited look at existing records.

A Department of Homeland Security project to expand sharing 
substantially, called the Information Network, has been bedeviled by 
cost overruns, poor planning and ambivalence on the part of local and 
state authorities, according to the Government Accountability Office. 
Almost every state has established organizations known as 
intelligence fusion centers to collect, analyze and share information 
about possible leads. But many of those centers are underfunded and 
undermanned, and some of the analysts are not properly trained, the 
GAO said last year.

Federal authorities have high hopes for the N-DEx system, which is to 
begin phasing in as early as this month. They envision a time when 
N-DEx, developed by Raytheon for $85 million, will enable 200,000 
state and local investigators, as well as federal counterterrorism 
investigators, to search across millions of police reports, in some 
15,000 state and local agencies, with a few clicks of a computer 
mouse. Those reports will include names of suspects, associates, 
victims, persons of interest, witnesses and any other person named in 
an incident, arrest, booking, parole or probation report.

The system will be accessible to federal law-enforcement agencies, 
such as the FBI, and state fusion centers. Intelligence analysts at 
the National Counterterrorism Center and FBI's Foreign Terrorist 
Tracking Center likely will have access to the system as well.

"The goal is to create a one-stop shop for criminal justice 
information," the FBI's Bush said.

In the meantime, local and state authorities have charged ahead with 
their own networks, sometimes called "nodes," and begun stitching 
them together through legal agreements and electronic links.

At least 1,550 jurisdictions across the country use Coplink systems, 
through some three dozen nodes. That's a huge increase from 2002, 
when Coplink was first available commercially.

At least 400 other agencies are sharing information and doing link 
analysis through the Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or Linx, a 
Navy Criminal Investigative Service project built by Northrop Grumman 
using commercial technology. Linx users include more than 100 police 
forces in the District, Virginia and Maryland.

Hundreds of other police agencies across the country are using 
different information-sharing systems with varying capabilities. 
Officials in Ohio have created a data warehouse containing the police 
records of nearly 800 jurisdictions, while leaving it to local 
departments to provide analytical tools.
Same Data, New Results

Authorities are aware that all of this is unsettling to people 
worried about privacy and civil liberties. Mark D. Rasch, a former 
federal prosecutor who is now a security consultant for FTI 
Consulting, said that the mining of police information by 
intelligence agencies could lead to improper targeting of U.S. 
citizens even when they've done nothing wrong.

Some officials avoid using the term intelligence because of those 
sensitivities. Others are open about their aim to use information and 
technology in new ways.

One widely used Coplink product is called Intel Lead. It enables 
agencies to enter new information, tips or observations into the data 
warehouses, which can then be accessed by people with proper 
authority. Another service under development, called "predictor," 
would use data and software to make educated guesses about what could happen.

"Intel Lead is particularly applicable to the needs of statewide 
criminal intelligence and antiterrorism fusion centers as well as 
federal agencies who need to bridge the intelligence gap," said a 
news release by Knowledge Computing, the company that makes Coplink.

Robert Griffin, the chief executive of Knowledge Computing, said 
Coplink yields clues and patterns they otherwise would not see. "It's 
de facto intelligence that's actionable," Griffin said.

Managers of Linx are eager to distinguish their system from the 
commercial Coplink and its more extensive capabilities. They 
acknowledge their system includes data-analysis capabilities, and it 
will feed information to counterterrorism and intelligence 
authorities. In fact, the system is designed to serve as a bridge 
between law enforcement and intelligence.

But they said Linx is not an intelligence system under federal laws, 
because it relies on records police have always kept. "It does not 
create intelligence," said Michael Dorsey, the Naval Criminal 
Investigative Service special agent in charge. "It creates knowledge."

To allay the public's fears, many police agencies segregate 
information collected in the process of enforcing the law from 
intelligence gathered on gangs, drug dealers and the like. Projects 
receiving federal funding must do so.

Nearly every state and local jurisdiction has its own guides for 
these new systems, rules that include restrictions intended to 
protect against police intrusiveness, authorities said. The systems 
also automatically keep track of how police use them.

N-DEx, too, will have restrictions aimed at preventing the abuse of 
the data it gathers. FBI officials said that agencies seeking access 
to N-DEx would be vetted, and that only authorized individuals would 
have access. Audit trails on whoever touches a piece of data would be 
kept. And no investigator would be allowed to take action -- make an 
arrest, for instance -- based on another agency's data without first 
checking with that agency.

But even some advocates of information-sharing technology worry that 
without proper oversight and enforceable restrictions the new 
networks pose a threat to basic American values by giving police too 
much power over information. Timothy Sample, a former intelligence 
official who runs the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, is 
among those who think computerized information-sharing is critical to 
national security but fraught with risks.

"As a nation, our laws have not kept up," said Sample, whose group 
serves as a professional association of intelligence officials in the 
government and intelligence contracting executives in the private sector.

Thomas McNamara, chief of the federal Information Sharing Environment 
office, said a top goal of federal officials is persuading regional 
systems to adopt most of the federal rules, both for privacy and to 
build a sense of confidence among law enforcement authorities who 
might be reluctant to share widely because of security concerns.

"Part of the challenge is to leverage these cutting-edge tools so we 
can securely and appropriately share that information which supports 
efforts to protect our communities from future terrorist attacks," 
McNamara said. "Equally important is that we do so in a manner that 
fully protects the information privacy and legal rights of all Americans."

Miranda, the Tucson police chief, said there's no overstating the 
utility of Coplink for his force. But he too acknowledges that such 
power raises new questions about how to keep it in check and ensure 
that the trust people place in law enforcement is not misplaced.
"I don't want the people in my community to feel we're behind every 
little tree and surveilling them," he said. "If there's any kind of 
inkling that we're misusing our power and our technology, that trust 
will be destroyed."





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