National "Dragnet" Connecting at State, Local Level

Squirtle tips us to a Washington Post story about the progress and expansion of N-DEx - the National Data Exchange. Developed by Raytheon for a mere $85 million, N-DEx is hailed as a unified intelligence sharing system, which will allow agencies to share and analyze data from all levels of law enforcement. From the Post: "Three decades ago, Congress imposed limits on domestic intelligence activity after revelations that the FBI, Army, local police and others had misused their authority for years to build troves of personal dossiers and monitor political activists and other law-abiding Americans. Since those reforms, police and federal authorities have observed a wall between law enforcement information-gathering, relating to crimes and prosecutions, and more open-ended intelligence that relates to national security and counterterrorism. That wall is fast eroding following the passage of laws expanding surveillance authorities, the push for information-sharing networks, and the expectation that local and state police will play larger roles as national security sentinels."

Comments

A helpful guideline:

[TubeSteak]

I'm going to quote an old post from the "DMCA Abuse Widespread" article:

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying . They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

Re:A helpful guideline:

[poetmatt]

Really? What part of the PRO IP act as a recent example? Or how about this "no swear word" ordinance in a California town? You'd call good intentions directly stifling the first amendment? You don't think this was the goal straight from the start, that now it has to be challenged to be proven wrong?

Re:A helpful guideline:

[base3]

Right--that's why the Supreme Court has upheld State laws that deny their citizens rights under the Constitution, because the Constitution only applies Federally. Oh, wait.

Re:A helpful guideline:

[wannabegeek2]

Uhhhhh...

I hate to point this out, but most State Constitutions mirror the Federal Constitution.

So, have you read the California Constitution? Really read it?

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

SECTION 1. All people are by nature free and independent and have
inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and
liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing
and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

SEC. 2. (a) Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or
her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of
this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or
press.

Sorry, but it really makes me cranky when someone uses the, "but that is a State law" argument. This is the United States of America, United being the operative word. In many cases the State Constitutions are more direct regarding our Rights than the Federal counterpart. Case in point, the Constitution of the State of Indiana.

Section 32. The people shall have a right to bear arms, for the defense of themselves and the State.

Takes care of that pesky "militia" subversion of the intent of the Framers, doesn't it?

By and large most Americans don't expend a lot of energy trying to understand Vertical Separation of Powers in regards to our rights, as at the Federal level there really shouldn't be any.

"Amendment 10
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to
the people." The State Constitutions cannot be contrary to the United States Constitution, and in regards to the Rights granted by the Constitution cannot be more restrictive, but that's it. The rest of your Rights are reserved to your State, or yourself.

Neat concept, huh?

Heh...

[Oxy the moron]

I've actually worked (albeit very briefly) on Indiana's part of this system, iDex. At my previous job, I worked on a police department records management system, and we had to write code to "plug in" to this National database. The odd thing about this is that we had to write our software to work in 4 different states (IL, IN, NY, SC) and each state (of course) does their data collection differently. So I'm not sure the database will be entirely useful, as some states will contribute one thing to one data field and some states will contribute something entirely different.

However, the scary part is, even if you call in to *report* a crime, your name goes into the system. I know this because our software kept track of every individual (criminal or otherwise) that was entered into it, and, to my knowledge, all data from the system was passed on to the iDex application.

It's Just NIBRS

[lexbaby]

This is nothing new. N-Dex is simply replacing NIBRS (National Incident Based Reporting System) with the new NIEM (National Information Exchange Model) XML standard. Take off the tin foil hats everyone.

Not too scared...

[kabocox]

What the heck is N-Dex?
N-DEx: Law Enforcement National Data Exchange
http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cjisd/ndex/ndex_home.htm

I've actually heard this term around vendors once or twice. It's on the horizon, but not being sold at the moment. Heck, we'd be happy to get out of Uniform Crime Reports and into National Incident-Based Reporting System. Trust me. Its not the cops or the police agencies that want those things. They like to keep their data in their black box and share it with no one. It's the various folks at the federal/state level and the newspaper people that like to compare how your police department is doing with the neighbors that drives this. NIBRS is all about crime stats so that those that like to compare crime stats have more columns of information to compare.

There was a program called RPIS that died still born that was one of the precursors to this. It was mainly aimed at drug task forces to share intel data. It never really went anywhere. No one at our agency every entered anything into the system.

I've heard N-Dex in connection with NIBRs. The way its talked about is using those crime stats and sort of generating a "weather map" of crime stats or at least trying to predict future crimes based on current crime trends at more than just the local level. I think that sounds really cool in theory. I have serious doubts that they'll get and keep it up though. This sounds like something the feds will work on for a few years and will die off in 5 or so years. I'll wait until vendors start pushing N-Dex as a selling point or the state suddenly requiring it before I'm interested in it for our agency.