Suit Advances Against Michigan Police Use of MATRIX Database

A judge last week gave the American Civil Liberties Union more time to investigate how the Michigan State Police Department is using a controversial data collection program, possibly in violation of state law. The civil rights group is suing the department for allegedly breaking a 1980 statute that requires law enforcement to gain legislative approval or establish citizen oversight when sharing certain kinds of personal information with out-of-state agencies. Since December 2003, Michigan police have participated in the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or "MATRIX," a federally funded private database project that collects information from government agencies and private corporations. MATRIX is designed to analyze an unprecedented amount of data from various sources in order to facilitate law enforcement investigations. While noting that MATRIX has some legitimate law enforcement uses, the ACLU questions other purported uses of the database that delve more deeply into the realm of profiling and identifying suspects based on speculative criteria. Though spokespeople for Seisint, Inc., the company that developed MATRIX, have denied that the database is used for data mining, internal Seisint documents obtained by the ACLU and reviewed by The NewStandard show that in the days shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Seisint used a "terrorist quotient" to identify 120,000 individuals with "High Terrorist Factor" scores. Public concern has stopped law enforcement in most states from publicly participating the MATRIX, but the program, which is funded and administered in part by the Department of Homeland Security, is still utilized in Michigan, Florida, Ohio, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The ACLU is challenging Michigan’s participation because it is the only MATRIX-using state with a law on the books protecting state residents from privacy breaches by out of state law enforcement agencies. [more]

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