National Dragnet Is a Click Away

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."