[Shadow_Group] Mining the Matrix: computer program marks thousands as potential terrorist

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

Mining the Matrix - A computer program has marked
thousands of citizens as potential terrorists.
By Jim DeFede 

<http://www.motherjones.com/toc/2004/09/index.html<http://www.motherjonescom/toc/2004/09/index.html>>
September/October 2004 Issue 

The idea came to him while sipping a martini. It was
September 13, 2001, and Hank Asher was sitting in his
$8 million home in Boca Raton, Florida, seething over
the terrorist strikes. Asher, creator of advanced
data-processing software, suddenly realized he could
program his company's computers to hunt Al Qaeda
members hiding in the United States.

Within a day, Asher's new program had sorted through
30 billion records-public and private-that his
company,
Seisint Inc., had obtained over the years. The result?


The names of 419 people he believed the government
should investigate. He invited state and federal
agents
to his office to review his work, and they were
amazed:
The FBI was already investigating five names on the
list, and a sixth turned out to be one of the
hijackers.

The agents became fixtures at Seisint's Boca Raton
headquarters, helping Asher to develop a terrorist
profile. The program then culled through databases,
rating millions of people for terrorist potential
according to a combination of factors including: age,
gender, ethnicity, criminal record, credit history,
how they shipped or received packages, anomalies in
Social Security numbers and driver's licenses, and
addresses within the vicinity of known terrorists.
Within weeks, the system had a list of 120,000 names
with High Terrorist Factor (HTF) scores.

Three years later, Asher's brainchild has blossomed
into the MATRIX-the Multistate Anti-Terrorism
Information Exchange, a network of state databases
subsidized by the Department of Homeland Security and
the Justice Department. While Seisint provides its
databases, technology, and facilities for the project,
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and a
nonprofit research institute in Florida manage the
day-to-day oper-ations. Law enforcement agencies in
four other states-Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania-are enrolled in the project, which allows
them to conduct searches for criminal investigations
in
return for putting their own databases into MATRIX.
Although a number of states have withdrawn from the
program, citing administrative costs, Florida governor
Jeb Bush, a strong backer of MATRIX, is working to
recruit more. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, however, wants to
eliminate federal funding for MATRIX.
"They are searching through disconnected records,
which may not be accurate, looking for patterns and
drawing conclusions about people," says Barry
Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and
Liberty Project.
"One conclusion they drew is that there are 120,000
suspected terrorists in the United States. If there
are 120,000 terrorists in America, then we are in much
deeper trouble than anyone ever imagined."
Even worse, the list has never been made public,
meaning that thousands of people are unaware that they
have been singled out as potential terrorists.

Steinhardt notes that federal officials are
administering this program through the states, letting
the MATRIX avoid scrutiny. "There is no question they
have hidden this from Con-gress," he says.

Law enforcement officials today describe MATRIX as
nothing more than a powerful search engine that can
simultaneously scan billions of records.
They say that it merely consolidates databases
already
available to them but dispersed across multiple
computer systems.
According to Mark Zadra, chief of investigations for
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the MATRIX
is no longer used to generate lists of terrorist
suspects. 

Yet that wasn't the spin MATRIX advocates used to
hype
the program. In convincing states to join, Seisint and
Florida officials developed a PowerPoint presentation
highlighting the system's ability to root out would-be
terrorists. According to Seisint's own promotional
material, within one week of receiving the list of
120,000 names, "several arrests" were made, and in
subsequent months "other arrests using the HTF"
followed.
Officials refuse to provide details about the
arrests,
though it is believed most were for immigration
violations.

After producing the list at his own expense, Asher, a
53-year-old who was already a mega-millionaire from
his
AutoTrack system, was eager to gain national support
for his new project. Although he is a Democrat, he
wrote two checks in late 2002 to the Republican
Party-$5,000 to the Florida party, $50,000 to the
national party. In January 2003, he was invited to the
White House to give a presentation to Vice President
Dick Cheney, FBI director Robert Mueller, and Homeland
Security director Tom Ridge. Jeb Bush was also
present.

Inside the Roosevelt Room, Asher demonstrated the
MATRIX's potential. According to a document titled
"Briefing Points for the Vice President of the United
States," which the ACLU obtained through a public
records request, the "factual data analysis portion of
the project holds the most promise of identifying
potential terrorist cells and solving other crimes."

It also notes that Florida was already a partner in
the project with Seisint, a firm that specializes in
providing data for employee screenings, debt
recoveries, and identity verifications. The Department
of Homeland Security subsequently awarded the MATRIX
$8 million as part of a "cooperative agreement" that
requires a Homeland Security project manager to
"maintain managerial oversight and control of the
activities, including redirection of MATRIX activities
or resources."

For civil libertarians, the MATRIX conjures up
memories of another data-mining project-Admiral John
Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program,
which the Senate, out of civil liberties concerns,
nixed in January 2003 before it launched.
MATRIX, however, has escaped congressional scrutiny
since it is considered a state program. And while
MATRIX officials say that they are not using the
system
to create lists of potential terrorists, critics worry
that nothing forbids them from doing that in the
future.

But Asher is unlikely to be involved in such a
decision. In July, Seisint was sold to Reed Elsevier,
the Anglo-Dutch information and publishing company
that owns LexisNexis. He had already resigned from
Seisint's board of directors, as federal officials
last
year became aware of his smuggling planeloads of
cocaine into the United States in the early 1980s.
(He was never charged with a crime and became an
informant against other drug traffickers.) 

Still, Asher thinks the Feds are mistaken in not
using
the system to its full, terrorist-scoring potential.
"If the terrorist attacks continued and the Sears
Tower came tumbling down and the Golden Gate Bridge
collapsed and Lake Superior was poisoned and a dirty
bomb went off in Houston," he says, "would we be
talking about whether we find it offensive for the
government to look into our personal records to
determine we are not terrorists?"

Jim DeFede has been reporting on Miami politics since
1991, and joined the Miami Herald as a metro columnist
in 2002. He recently published his first book, The Day
the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland.

=====
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