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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
To law enforcement—such as criminal history, corrections-department information, driver’s license, and motor-vehicle data—and nontraditional ones, such as:17 Pilot licenses issued by the Federal Aviation Administration, Aircraft ownership, Property ownership, U.S. Coast Guard vessel registrations, State sexual-offender lists, Corporate filings, Uniform Commercial Code filings or business liens, Bankruptcy filings, and State-issued professional licenses. Concerns were raised that the data would be combined with private data, such as credit history, airline reservations, and telephone logs; but the MATRIX Web site stated those would not be included. The system initially included a scoring system called High Terrorist Factor (HTF) that identified people who might be considered high-risk, although it was later claimed that the HTF element of the system had been eliminated.18 The pilot program ended in April 2005. Legal, privacy, security, and technical concerns about requirements to transfer state-owned data to MATRIX administrators and continuing costs associated with using the system prompted several states that initially participated or planned to participate in MATRIX to withdraw.19 By March 2004, 11 of the 16 states that originally expressed interest in participating had withdrawn from the program. In an attempt to address some of the concerns, the architecture was changed to allow distributed access to data in such a way that no 16 Krouse, op. cit., p. 4. 17 Data sources are identified in the Congressional Research Service report (Krouse, op. cit., p. 6) as referenced from the official MATRIX program Web site, http://www.matrix-at.org, which is no longer available. 18 B. Bergstein, “Database firm gave feds terror suspects: ‘Matrix’ developer turned over 120,000 names,” Associated Press, May 20, 2004, available at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5020795/. 19 See, for instance, Georgia Department of Motor Vehicle Safety, “Department of Motor Vehicle Safety’s Participation in MATIX,” September 29, 2003; New York State Police, Letter to Chairman of MATRIX, March 9, 2004; Texas Department of Public Safety, Letter to Chair, Project MATRIX, May 21, 2003. Those documents and additional information on state involvement are available from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Web site at http://www.aclu.org/privacy/spying/15701res20050308.html. Suggested Citation:"Appendix I: Illustrative Government Data Mining Programs and Activity." National Research Council. 2008. Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12452. × data transfers from state-controlled systems would be required to share data.20 The CRS report concluded that “it remains uncertain whether the MATRIX pilot project is currently designed to assess and address privacy and civil liberty concerns.”21 For instance, there appears to have been no comprehensive plan to put safeguards and policies in place to avoid potential abuses of the system, such as monitoring of activities of social activists or undermining of political activities.22 I.4 ABLE DANGER This classified program established in October 1999 by the U.S. Special Operations Command and ended by 2001 called for the use of data mining tools to gather information on terrorists from government databases and from open sources, such as the World Wide Web.23 The program used link analysis to identify underlying connections between people.24
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