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.

It may be cliche, but...

[hyades1]

... if the government is allowed to get away with this, the terrorists have won.

It's extremely difficult to take over a country where everything is decentralized and/or chaotic. You might inflict damage on one spot, but all the others just keep cooking along. US problems in Iraq are a good example of this.

Conversely, a society where every detail of every citizen's life is available in a centralized database (which is conveniently located in the same place as a strong central government) virtually begs to be taken over. You have only to take over the brain, and the rest of the body politic just keeps obliviously going about its business. The only difference is that there's a new boss raking in the profits.

And to all those jackasses who like to say, "If you have nothing to hide, what are you afraid of", I'd simply ask in return, "Are you really stupid enough to believe the information a government collects on you is always accurate?"

These dipshits can't locate 10 million illegal aliens, and they found out the Berlin Wall was coming down on the evening news. But you trust them to notice you're not the same guy as the one with a similar name and SIN who likes to rob banks half way across the country?

If somebody doesn't put some reins on these bastards right quick, we're going to find out there's worse things than losing a city or two to terrorist action.

Re:That's cool

[rock_climbing_guy]

Well, there are allegations that top government officials have been illegally using the secret dossiers that it already has.

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.