... that you might someday be caught in a DRAGNET?
No, not the old Jack Webb crime "Dragnet" of 1950s TV fame.
But an all-enveloping sweep that includes YOU and every adult citizen
of the Un-United States and many other locales.
It's your government's dragnet.
And you're forever "caught."
---------------------------------
"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."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/05/AR2008030503656.html
DID YOU EVER THINK ... ?
