Multistate Anti-terrorism Information Exchange System

The Multistate Anti-terrorism Information Exchange System (MATRIX) is a data mining system that provides the capability to store, analyze, and exchange sensitive terrorism-related and other criminal intelligence data among agencies within a state, among states, and between state and federal agencies. Information in MATRIX databases includes criminal history records, driver’s license data, vehicle registration records, incarceration records, and digitized photographs. Public awareness of MATRIX and of similar large-scale data mining or data mining-like projects has led to concerns about the government’s use of data mining to conduct a mass “dataveillance” &mdash; a surveillance of large groups of people &mdash; to sift through vast amounts of personally identifying data to find individuals who might fit a terrorist profile.