The DOJ is building a huge database that could eventually hold a dossier
on every citizen in the country. Hummmmmm, this could lead to a society
where there are no more secrets; no more privacy.
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Justice Dept. Database Stirs Privacy Fears
Size and Scope of the Interagency Investigative Tool Worry Civil
Libertarians
By Dan Eggen <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/staff/email/dan+eggen/>
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 26, 2006; Page A07
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."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/25/AR2006122500483_2.html?referrer=email
or
http://tinyurl.com/yzumuv
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Regards,
LelandJ
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