Data sharing among local, state, and federal law enforcement grows

collect, analyze, and share information about possible leads. Many of these centers are underfunded and undermanned, and some of the analysts are not properly trained, the GAO said last year. Federal authorities have high hopes for the N-DEx system, which is to begin phasing in as early as this month. They envision a time when N-DEx, developed by Raytheon for $85 million, will enable 200,000 state and local investigators, as well as federal counterterrorism investigators, to search across millions of police reports, in some 15,000 state and local agencies, with a few clicks of a computer mouse. These reports will include names of suspects, associates, victims, persons of interest, witnesses and any other person named in an incident, arrest, booking, parole or probation report. The system will be accessible to federal law-enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, and state fusion centers. Intelligence analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center and FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Center likely will have access to the system as well. “The goal is to create a one-stop shop for criminal justice information,” the FBI’s Bush said.

In the meantime, local and state authorities have charged ahead with their own networks, sometimes called “nodes,” and begun stitching them together through legal agreements and electronic links. At least 1,550 jurisdictions across the country use Coplink systems, through some three dozen nodes. Thhis is a huge increase from 2002, when Coplink was first available commercially. At least 400 other agencies are sharing information and doing link analysis through the Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or Linx, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service project built by Northrop Grumman using commercial technology. Linx users include more than 100 police forces in the District, Virginia and Maryland. Hundreds of other police agencies across the country are using different information-sharing systems with varying capabilities. Officials in Ohio have created a data warehouse containing the police records of nearly 800 jurisdictions, while leaving it to local departments to provide analytical tools.

Authorities are aware that all of this is unsettling to people worried about privacy and civil liberties. Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who is now a security consultant for FTI Consulting, said that the mining of police information by intelligence agencies could lead to improper targeting of U.S. citizens even when they have done nothing wrong. Some officials avoid using the term intelligence because of those sensitivities. Others are open about their aim to use