Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Anti-Terror Database Got Show at White House (TechNews.com):
"One day in January 2003, an entrepreneur from Florida named Hank Asher walked into the Roosevelt Room of the White House to demonstrate a counterterrorism tool he invented after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Soon to be called Matrix, it was a computer program capable of examining records of billions of people in seconds.

Accompanied by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the state's top police official, Asher showed his creation to Vice President Cheney, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Tom Ridge, who was about to be sworn in as secretary of the new Department of Homeland Security, according to people at the meeting.

The demonstration startled everyone in the room who had not seen it before. Almost as quickly as questions could be asked, the system generated long reports on a projection screen: names, addresses, driver license photos, links to associates, even ethnicity. At one point, an Asher associate recalled, Ridge turned toward Cheney and nudged him with an elbow, apparently to underscore his amazement at the power of what they were seeing. A few months later, Ridge approved an $8 million 'cooperative agreement' from his department to help states link to the computer system.… "

One document, reported by the Associated Press yesterday, showed that Asher and his colleagues had created a list of 120,000 individuals with personal attributes that gave them a "high terrorist factor" score deemed worthy of extra attention from authorities.

"When the Department deeply involves itself in a program as fraught with significant privacy problems as the Matrix, your office must investigate," Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, and a colleague wrote in a letter to Kelly.

Kelly said in an interview that she would be "happy to review the documents and the scope of the relationship."

"We try to be supportive of state and local homeland security efforts," she said, "but only with appropriate safeguards."

A continuing debate over the proper balance between privacy and security intensified when details of the Matrix system became public last summer. Matrix organizers, including intelligence officials in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said the system greatly enhanced the speed of investigations by combining government data with 20 billion commercial records about people.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43608-2004May20.html

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