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Enter the Matrix (If You're Not Already There) |
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Posted by Steven Wu on Wednesday, August 06 @ 10:43:53 EDT
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In yet another demonstration of government officials' penchant for really bad names, federal and Florida law enforcement officials have unveiled a new database known as the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, a.k.a the Matrix:
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. . . . At least 135 police agencies in the state have signed up for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement database service, which began operation more than a year ago. At least a dozen states--including Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan--said they want to add their records.
Read the article here.
The claim, as usual, is that law enforcement is simply accessing old data in new ways: the intrusion, if any, comes solely at the level of comparing and evaluating data, not at the level of collecting it. This has always struck me as an interesting argument. On the one hand, complaints about the Matrix (and its federal predecessor, the Total/Terrorism Information Awareness program) seem about as inane as complaints about police finally organizing their file cabinets, or installing modem lines to allow transmission of criminals' files. On the other hand, such complaints also rely on legitimate concerns about decreasing privacy, similar to the concerns evinced by the Supreme Court in Kyllo v. United States, in which the Court found that thermal imaging constitutes a search that must meet Fourth Amendment requirements. It's unclear to me where programs like the Matrix fall on this spectrum.
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Re: Enter the Matrix (If You're Not Already There) (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Thursday, August 07 @ 16:32:54 EDT | What really bothers me is that private commericial companys have always tried to deflect concerns over privacy by claiming that they only wanted to use the information to sell their products. Now, those very same companies are selling that information to the government to populate these new systems. What was onlt supposed to be used for marketing can now make you a suspect in a crime.
For similar reasons, I disagree with Steven Wu's analogy that it is similar to a law enforcement agancy organizing it file cabinets. The information contained in the Florida system contains more than what the police already had on file. It represents the gathering together information outside of government files.
At its core, this type of privacy battle relates back to American's deep distrust of government intrusion of privacy, as opposed to the Europeans (who fear private commercial intrusion but seem to trust their governments). I think in the American view, we understand that no matter how much information a company may collect, at worst it will use that data to do what any business does--sell stuff. Systems, like that developed in Florida, represent moving information directly into the hands of those we traditionally have not trusted.
While I agree that such systems could be very effective and don't blame law enforcement for wanting them, there are reasons we do not always do the most efficient thing--there called Constitutional rights.
I am sure a all-knowing police force could be very effective at solving crimes, but it sounds a lot like some of the organizations this country has spilled blood to defeat.
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Re: Enter the Matrix (If You're Not Already There) (Score: 0) by Anonymous on Friday, August 15 @ 15:32:29 EDT | I suspect most of these private databases don't have information
of better quality than hear-say, but that they will be treated
as if it is quite reliable. |
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