-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 16, 2007 6:36:23 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: DoJ's File-Sharing
Justice Dept. Database Stirs Privacy Fears
Size and Scope of "Interagency Investigative Tool" Worry Civil
Libertarians
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post, December 26, 2006; A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/25/
AR2006122500483.html
The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows
state and local police officers around the country to search
millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement
Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies,
according to Justice officials.
The system, known as "OneDOJ," already holds approximately 1
million case records and is projected to triple in size over the
next three years, Justice officials said. The files include
investigative reports, criminal-history information, details of
offenses, and the names, addresses and other information of
criminal suspects or targets, officials said.
The database is billed by its supporters as a much-needed step
toward better information-sharing with local law enforcement
agencies, which have long complained about a lack of cooperation
from the federal government.
But civil-liberties and privacy advocates say the scale and
contents of such a database raise immediate privacy and civil
rights concerns, in part because tens of thousands of local police
officers could gain access to personal details about people who
have not been arrested or charged with crimes.
The little-noticed program has been coming together over the past
year and a half. It already is in use in pilot projects with local
police in Seattle, San Diego and a handful of other areas,
officials said. About 150 separate police agencies have access,
officials said.
But in a memorandum sent last week to the FBI, U.S. attorneys and
other senior Justice officials, Deputy Attorney General Paul J.
McNulty announced that the program will be expanded immediately to
15 additional regions and that federal authorities will
"accelerate . . . efforts to share information from both open and
closed cases."
Eventually, the department hopes, the database will be a central
mechanism for sharing federal law enforcement information with
local and state investigators, who now run checks individually, and
often manually, with Justice's five main law enforcement agencies:
the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Prisons
and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Within three years, officials said, about 750 law enforcement
agencies nationwide will have access.
In an interview last week, McNulty said the goal is to broaden the
pool of data available to local and state investigators beyond
systems such as the National Crime Information Center, the FBI-run
repository of basic criminal records used by police and sheriff's
deputies around the country.
By tapping into the details available in incident reports,
interrogation summaries and other documents, investigators will
dramatically improve their chances of closing cases, he said.
"The goal is that all of U.S. law enforcement will be able to look
at each other's records to solve cases and protect U.S. citizens,"
McNulty said. "With OneDOJ, we will essentially hook them up to a
pipe that will take them into its records."
McNulty and other Justice officials emphasize that the information
available in the database already is held individually by the FBI
and other federal agencies. Much information will be kept out of
the system, including data about public corruption cases,
classified or sensitive topics, confidential informants,
administrative cases and civil rights probes involving allegations
of wrongdoing by police, officials said.
But civil-liberties and privacy advocates -- many of whom are
already alarmed by the proliferation of federal databases -- warn
that granting broad access to such a system is almost certain to
invite abuse and lead to police mistakes.
Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at
the American Civil Liberties Union, said the main problem is one of
"garbage in, garbage out," because case files frequently include
erroneous or unproved allegations.
"Raw police files or FBI reports can never be verified and can
never be corrected," Steinhardt said. "That is a problem with even
more formal and controlled systems. The idea that they're creating
another whole system that is going to be full of inaccurate
information is just chilling."
Steinhardt noted that in 2003, the FBI announced that it would no
longer meet the Privacy Act's accuracy requirements for the
National Crime Information Center, its main criminal-background-
check database, which is used by 80,000 law enforcement agencies
across the country.
"I look at this system and imagine it will raise many of the same
questions that the whole information-sharing approach is raising
across the government," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based group
that has criticized many of the government's data-gathering policies.
"Information that's collected in the law enforcement realm can find
[its way] into other arenas and be abused very easily," Rotenberg
said.
McNulty and other officials said the data compiled under OneDOJ
would be subject to the same civil-liberties and privacy oversight
as any other Justice Department database. A coordinating committee
within Justice will oversee the database and other information-
sharing initiatives, according to McNulty's memo.
Gene Voegtlin, legislative counsel for the Arlington-based
International Association of Chiefs of Police, said his group
welcomes any initiatives to share more data with local law
enforcement agencies.
"The working partnership between the states and the feds has gotten
much better than the pre-9/11 era," Voegtlin said. "But we're still
overcoming a lot of issues, both functional and
organizational . . . so we're happy to see DOJ taking positive
steps in that area."
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