Police Data Sharing Is A Work In ProgressPolice Data Sharing Is A Work In Progress

The federal government's disclosure this month that it won't continue funding the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or Matrix, closes a chapter on a controversial law-enforcement data-sharing pilot project created in the wake of 9/11. Three years and $12 million later, just two states will continue using the technology, as other projects compete to meet the goal of better sharing of crime data across state lines.

Matrix's underlying Factual Analysis Criminal Threat Solution, or Facts, technology is a desktop search application used to access a database populated by law enforcement in participating states. Though federal funding has ended, the database is available for state law-enforcement agencies with money to pay for it. But just two states--Florida and Ohio--out of 16 that participated or initially expressed interest in Matrix have signed contracts to continue using the technology, which is owned by LexisNexis, an information-services company.

Both states have one-year deals with LexisNexis that they're paying for with federal grants. "Law-enforcement data sharing isn't new; we just found a more effective and efficient way to do it," says Mark Zadra, chief of investigations for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's Office of Statewide Intelligence.

Few questioned the technology's ability to assist investigations. It's essentially a database and search engine built to more quickly access public information such as criminal histories and courthouse records. The only information Facts users access that's not available to the public are driver's license photos. But that didn't stop privacy concerns, at least in part, from scuttling it.

Matrix launched in January 2002 with $8 million from the Homeland Security Department and $4 million from the Justice Department. A private company, Seisint Inc., which LexisNexis bought in September, created Matrix's core Facts technology with help from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which was working with federal law enforcement investigating 9/11 terrorist activity in Florida. Under the original model for Matrix, law-enforcement groups from each state were asked to transfer data to a database hosted at a Florida facility that Seisint owned; the Florida Department of Law Enforcement managed the servers and database.

Matrix quickly came under fire over concerns about the nature of the data being shared, the security of this data, and the cost of participating in the project. The Facts database never included fingerprint, credit-card, or travel-record data, Zadra says, but it faced repeated charges that it did.

There were many reasons Matrix failed to take hold, says Jeff Vining, a Gartner analyst who covers homeland security and law enforcement. In addition to its difficulty reconciling privacy laws from state to state, Matrix competes with other federal and regional data-sharing initiatives, including the federally funded Regional Information Sharing System and the Homeland Security Information Network. "Matrix is an idea that is redundant now," Vining says.

It's likely that Matrix also ran into trouble during new Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's review of the department, when he saw just how many states had dropped out, Vining says. Still, Matrix is an important first, helping law enforcement investigate the 9/11 attacks, he says.

With the fragmented state of data-sharing among agencies, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement holds out hope that states will standardize on a single data-sharing technology. With its LexisNexis contract, it can move data if a competing technology receives federal blessing or widespread state interest.