Matrix II Database Would Tap Into Fla. Insurance Records

Florida insurance companies could be required to provide customer information if Florida law officials decide to implement a comprehensive Multi-state Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or Matrix database, now being contemplated.

According to Wired News, Matrix contained billions of commercial and government records and was considered overly invasive by civil libertarians. Matrix was supposed to help police track down terrorists and kidnappers, but shut down on April 15 when federal funds ran out.

Florida law enforcement officials want Matrix II to include more types of data than the original, including financial and insurance records, according to an April 12 official call for information from vendors. The document outlines Florida’s intention to rebuild the system, an early step in the project’s competitive bidding process.

Mark Zadra, chief of Florida’s Office of Statewide Intelligence, said the state wants to rebuild the system and hopes other states will join.
“Once we do the competitive procurement process and if we see there is an easy way to share information with other states, other states may want to take advantage of (it),” Zadra said.

The original system was a 13-state pilot program funded by $12 million from the departments of Justice and Homeland Security.
By the time the program shut down, participation had dwindled to just four states — Connecticut, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio — as states pulled out over concerns about costs and civil liberties.
The system was powered by supercomputer technology created by Seisint, a data company later acquired by LexisNexis.

According to Wired News, the system allowed law enforcement to search a centralized database populated with records collected by states — including criminal history, driver’s license photos, property deeds and fishing licenses — and billions of commercial data records.

For instance, an investigator could nearly instantaneously find all the white Ford Taurus vans whose license tag contained a “B,” “C” and a “D” — in any order — and that were registered within a ZIP-code range. Then photos of all the licensed drivers in households where such vehicles were registered could be pulled up.

Law enforcement searched the database 1,866,202 times between July 2003 and April 2005, though less than 3 percent were related to terrorism investigations, according to Florida officials.
Civil liberties groups said Florida officials convinced other states to join the Matrix program, in part based on the ability of the system to engage in “pre-crime” profiling of potential terrorists and criminals.
Florida officials maintain that Matrix was — and will continue to be — simply a smarter way to run down partial clues.

That capability is critical for terrorism and kidnapping investigators, according to Matrix officials.

Florida’s call for information about a Matrix successor may also raise eyebrows because it requires the vendor to have financial and insurance information, and the tools to analyze that information.

Though scores of companies sell data-mining and searching technology, only ChoicePoint, currently under media and government scrutiny for allowing identity thieves to harvest hundreds of thousands of records on Americans, has search technology and centralized insurance claim information.

Topics Florida