MATRIX - A Dossier for Every Person in Utah

jxs2151 writes: "According to the Deseret Morning News former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt signed Utah's 2.4 million residents up for a pilot program that gathers dossiers on every single man, woman and child and didn't bother to tell anyone. According to the article MATRIX -- Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange '...cross-references government records from both public and private databases, putting together a dossier on individuals for use by law enforcement.' The state's homeland security specialist dismisses concerns: '...any data gleaned for Utah's participation in MATRIX is information already available to law enforcement.' The Utah legislature is trying to figure out how to get the state out of the program but the question is how was the Governor able to enroll the -whole state- without anyone knowing?"

Comments

Making a big noise here in Utah....

[BWJones]

So, this has really kinda raised a stink here in Utah, and despite the states Homeland Security specialist stating that all of the information is already available to law enforcement, one issue is that all of this information is not currently available in one place and that many simply object to government accumulating so much personal information. The other issue is that the problem with databases is that once they are created, they really cannot be destroyed. The information in them tends to propagate into other projects or products and is also often used for generation of revenues by selling information to certain corporations.

For instance, from the article: Searchable databases allow law enforcement agents to probe for people using Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, property records, motor vehicle information and credit history. The information is collected by states and forwarded to a database in Florida, where a private company, Seisint Inc., builds and manages the database.

The fact that credit history is included and is documented along with these other aspects of identity and is run and managed by a private company is disturbing leading me to wonder what connections Gov. Leavitt might have with this company.

Finally, as noted in the article our current Gov., Olene Walker (she was Gov. Leavitt's assistant governor before he headed off to become a Bush appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency), apparently knew absolutely nothing about the project. As governor, Leavitt should have been representing the people of Utah, but what is it that he has done here?

Matrix in Georgia

[Anonymous Coward]

This just hit the news here in GA as well.

Here, it is the reverse situation. The governor (Sonny Perdue) has now ordered the state twice to *stop* participating in the Matrix program. The first order was ignored. I wonder if the second will go un-heeded as well?

one of 13 states?

[mateomiguel]

What I'm most concerned about right now is WHICH ARE THE OTHER TWELVE STATES?

Re:when governments remove civil liberties

[k98sven]

So you need to be eternally vigilant against people wanting to taking away your freedom, ie YOUR GOVERNMENT.

The real threat to freedom in the USA are the corporations.. big business.
With the exception of the law-enforcement and intelligence communities, the government isn't very interested in our freedoms.

But it's not only by working through congress the businesses get our rights handed over to them, it's through the courts.

With their armies of lawyers, they manipulate the system so that their propaganda is "free speech", whereas if you say something against them it's "slander".

Not to mention abuse of the DMCA, and any other law they can find.

As a Utah resident

[hendersj]

I have to say that I am absolutely outraged at what Gov. Leavitt has apparently done. I wasn't particularly happy with him over his stand on allowing the storage of nuclear waste in our state (something that apparently was a qualification for head of the Environmental Protection Agency).

IANAL, so I wonder - would something like this be grounds for some sort of class action lawsuit?

If it is, count me in.

It amazes me the things we in the US allow our government to do to us in the name of security:

• The USA PATRIOT Act
• MATRIX
• And the proposed Patriot II Act

If we the government keeps getting away with passing legislation like this, the terrorists win, and the government *becomes* the terrorists.

Re:Facts?

[C10H14N2]

This kills me. The vast majority of this information has been readily available to practically anyone for ages. Twenty years ago my family ran a company that did skip tracing as part of our service, so we operated under a private investigation license which gave us access to a number of _commercial_ databases. Almost every piece of information under discussion was available from all but a few states from a single source (at that time our primary source was CDB/Infotek). I routinely would cross-reference registered property (homes, cars, airplanes, boats), voter registration address lists, social security records, whatever. It would take on average about fifteen minutes to find anyone sans tinfoil hat with the tiniest shred of information. The key here is that every piece of information is about two degrees of separation from a SSN. Once you have the SSN, you can find everything else in a massive, combined (and expensive) search that would cross-reference everything from Maine to Hawaii including your magazine subscriptions.

That was twenty years ago.

This information has been there for decades. That it is two ergs easier to do today and includes all the backwater states that used mimeographs until the 90's is pretty trivial.

Personal Data

[Flavius Stilicho]

I used to work for an HMO that dealt with mental health records and claims. The information that we had access to is EXACTLY the type of information many corporate and government entities would LOVE to get their hands on. At one point, our company wanted to build a web based app to allow providers (shrinks) enter clinical data to chart progress, among other things. The flip side was that the system allowed 'us' to 'manage care'. I wasn't involved in the project until it was almost in final beta but when I DID get involved, the complete and utter lack of security for the entire system blew my mind. Ultimately, I was successful in having the system redesigned and then scrapped.

I guess the points I'm making are:

1. There was a really cool upside to this system. It really could have been a benefit to the doctors and patients in providing them better care. It could, and also would, have been used to deny care to cuts costs.
2. Corporations generally do not care about data security until the lack of said security jeapordizes their bottom line or places them at legal risk.
3. If the system ever DID make it into production, the information contained within could have easily been made available to the governement and/or highest bidder -- as is the case with the company running the MATRIX system.

The way I see it is that the benefits don't outway the risks. Just because we can doesn't mean we should.