[Dataloss] Justice Dept. Database Stirs Privacy Fears

[Richard Forno]

Justice Dept. Database Stirs Privacy Fears
Size and Scope of the Interagency Investigative Tool Worry Civil
Libertarians
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/25/AR2006122500
483_pf.html
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 26, 2006; 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."