02-05-2000

JUDICIARY: Making Crime Less Private

Last June, Border Patrol agents in Texas picked up a 39-year-old drifter
from Mexico named Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, conducted a database search on
him to see if he had any outstanding warrants, and, finding none, sent him
back to Mexico.


Two days after his release, a 73-year-old woman across the border in Texas
was found beaten to death in her home, and on the following day, a
26-year-old Houston teacher was also found beaten to death in her home.
Authorities now suspect that Resendez-Ramirez committed both
murders.


What the Border Patrol agents didn't know before they released
Resendez-Ramirez and sent him back to Mexico was that the FBI was
searching for him. They also were unaware that the Houston police had
informed the Immigration and Naturalization Service he was wanted for
questioning. The agents had no way of knowing that Resendez-Ramirez was
suspected of being the notorious "railroad killer" who
had committed murder in three different states last summer. All of the
victims-and the two Texas women-were beaten to death in a similar way.
Resendez-Ramirez is a suspect in nine killings and faces his first trial
next month.


Some criminal-justice experts say the Border Patrol would have kept
Resendez-Ramirez in custody if it had known the FBI and Houston police
were looking for him. This kind of speculation is energizing a planning
effort among Justice Department officials and state and local law
enforcement agencies. Since 1998, law enforcement officials at all levels
have been meeting to plan an integrated information network that would put
data from all law enforcement sources at the Border Patrol's
fingertips.


While such a network of criminal-justice information could provide law
enforcement agencies across the country with critical data for faster
crime solving and prevention, the linking of highly personal-and often
inaccurate-information under one electronic roof has privacy advocates
concerned. Without safeguards, they say, easy access to so much
information will lead to abuses.


Justice's plan is being billed as the Global Justice Information Sharing
Network. It is part of Vice President Al Gore's Access America initiative
to reinvent government by harnessing information technology. Paul Kendall,
the general counsel for the Office of Justice Programs, has been leading
the effort for the past three years.


"The benefit of this whole thing is that you really want a
capability to share the kind of information, so that the different
components of the justice system can play from the same book,"
Kendall explained in an interview with National Journal. Since more than
5,000 separate law enforcement agencies around the country have invested
time, training, and financial resources in their own systems and
databases, Kendall's task will prove daunting.


Kendall repeatedly emphasizes that the goal is not to create a centralized
federal database containing information on every arrest, suspect, or crime
in the United States. "We are not-repeat, not-talking about the
development of a single system, a single database," he says.
"Rather, we're trying to facilitate the development of the
capability that would allow all the myriad databases around the United
States to share information. The control of each database will remain in
the individual jurisdictions."


The goal is to allow law enforcement officials to use an intelligent Web
crawler to search databases in all other jurisdictions. They could
exchange files, data, fingerprints, arrest records, and outstanding
warrants with their colleagues in other jurisdictions.


Access to more-complete information, Kendall says, can help make the
criminal justice system more responsive and-most important-more accurate
and fair. Court systems, which have lagged behind police agencies in
making their data accessible, would be part of the network, providing
authorities with all-important information about the final outcome of
cases.


"Less than 50 percent of our FBI criminal records contain a final
case disposition-guilty, not guilty, or dismissed-because the local or
state judicial agency doesn't pass it on to us," explains Billy
Martin, the manager of operations for the FBI's Criminal Justice
Information Services Division. "For example, if all our record
shows is that someone has an arrest, and there's no disposition, without
further information on whether the person was convicted, we would have to
let gun dealers sell a gun to the guy, under current federal
law."


For years, law enforcement authorities have had access to federal
databases that contain crime information. Since 1967, the National Crime
Information Center has maintained a national index of theft reports,
arrest warrants, stolen property, and missing persons that officers in the
field can access within seconds. State and local authorities conduct more
than 2 million transactions and searches of the information each day,
making it one of the most-relied-upon federal crime databases. States are
also connected to an FBI network that allows them to check fingerprint
identification electronically, along with any corresponding criminal
history.


The new Justice network will include information from welfare, health,
education, and transportation systems. "We have to think in
broader terms, beyond the criminal justice system," Kendall says.
"We're seeing that much of the information authorities may need
is coming out of education, social services, and other
places."


Officials envision the crime data traveling vertically, from the federal
level down to state and local officials, as well as horizontally, from
state and local agencies in one state to officials in another town across
the country. Simply put, a better-informed cop is a better-armed
cop.


Kendall expects the process to be completed within three to five more
years, although funding and technology are still serious obstacles. In
each of the past several years, the Justice Department has awarded more
than $500 million in information technology grants. The effort to create
this new network and integrate so much information from so many disparate
agencies will cost hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress has yet
to appropriate.


Despite Kendall's statements that the goal is not to create a one-stop
federal database of criminal data, privacy advocates remain deeply
skeptical about the network's impact on individual privacy rights.


"Our government has a long, sad history of creating databases
that inevitably undergo what I call `function creep,' which means that
databases are purportedly created for one discrete purpose, yet, despite
initial promises of their creators, eventually take on new functions and
purposes that violate privacy rights even further," warns Barry
Steinhardt, associate director of the American Civil Liberties
Union.


Steinhardt points to the assurances made in the 1930s that Social Security
numbers would be used only to aid a national pension program.
"But over the last 60 years, they have become universal
identifiers that they claimed they would not be," Steinhardt
says. "And census records generated for statistical purposes were
employed during World War II to round up Japanese-Americans to place them
in internment camps."


Steinhardt points to the example of Image Data, a New Hampshire company,
which bought the images of 22 million drivers from three states to create
just the type of national database that privacy advocates fear. Image Data
repeatedly made assurances that the photographs and personal information
would be used only to develop an identity system for businesses trying to
combat retail, check-cashing, and credit card fraud.


But Image Data received $1.5 million in federal funds from the Secret
Service last year. With the support of several members of Congress, the
Secret Service provided the money for the project on the grounds that it
was a way to combat terrorism, immigration abuses, and other identity
crimes. An intense debate on privacy ensued, and the three states broke
their contracts with the company.


"No matter how many assurances there are about security, those
assurances end up being hollow," Steinhardt says. Although
Kendall and his boss, Attorney General Janet Reno, repeatedly cite the
need to protect privacy as one of the critical challenges for the network,
Steinhardt noted that no one from the Justice Department had invited the
ACLU to participate in discussions on privacy issues.


Another privacy concern is the sheer volume of such potentially
embarrassing and damning information. As of last November, the FBI has on
file fingerprint cards and criminal histories for more than 81 million
people, the vast majority of whom are Americans.


For Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit
consumer advocacy organization based in San Diego, the real concern is
insider abuse. "When you have such an enormous body of data at
your fingertips, we know-it's frequently happened at the Internal Revenue
Service, at the Social Security Administration-that it becomes highly
tempting for someone to get into the data to check on a neighbor, or for a
cop to check out the boy his daughter is dating," Givens says.
"One good way to stop that is to have an electronic audit trail
and have it accessed by a fingerprint reader."


While that may not be practical for officers working in the field, Kendall
concedes that both insider abuse of such a network and Steinhardt's
concern over "function creep" are serious problems.
"By paying closer and closer attention to privacy concerns, we
mitigate concerns over `function creep,' " Kendall
argues.


With the network's progress still in the early stages of development,
there's plenty of time for all sides to make their views heard.



David Byrd

National Journal