OHP's Col. Paul McClellan Makes Misleading Statements about MATRIX Database?

Freematt357 at aol.com Freematt357 at aol.com
Thu Apr 15 12:11:29 PDT 2004


Note from Matt Gaylor: Ohio Highway Patrol Superintendent, Colonel McClellan
says in the below article that the availability of the Matrix database could
have brought more law-enforcement attention sooner to the recent Columbus-area
car shootings that included the killing Nov. 25 of Gail Knisley on I-270.
Additionally, Colonel McClellan commented that he can get better Intel from
the
public library than he can at his office.

Col. McClellan's statements are somewhat strange given the fact that Ohio had
already been enrolled in the MATRIX database surveillance system during the
sniper shootings. This raises the question of the usefulness of the MATRIX
system in general or the Patrol's ability to use the system.  Col. McClellan
gives
the impression that Ohio does not have access to the MATRIX system, when in
fact Ohio does.

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Article published Friday, April 9, 2004

Database search system debated
Police agencies, civil libertarians divided over online records access

By DAVID PATCH
BLADE STAFF WRITER


http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040409/NEWS03/4040903
85/-1/NEWS


Information in a controversial database searching system already is publicly
available but not coordinated so law-enforcement officials can easily use it
to investigate crimes or thwart terrorism, the head of the Ohio Highway Patrol
told a local trucking group yesterday."Right now, the public library has
better information than we do," Col. Paul McClellan, the patrol's
superintendent,
told the Toledo Trucking Association at the Toledo Club. "When I go home at
night, I can find out more about people by surfing the Internet on my home
computer than I can in my office."

The MATRIX search system, which combs public records like driver's licenses,
vehicle registrations, court records, and land transaction information, is
available only to law-enforcement personnel with a specific investigative
purpose, the colonel said.


The system, whose name stands for Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information
Exchange, is managed by a Florida firm under contract to five states that are
piloting it, including Ohio and Michigan. So far, however, Ohio is not fully
participating by contributing photos or Social Security numbers from its
licensing
records, the colonel said.

Civil libertarians argue that the system is an open invitation for police to
track the behavior of ordinary citizens, regardless of their involvement in
criminal or terrorist activities.

MATRIX effectively is "an advanced surveillance system" designed not only to
"build dossiers on all of our lives," but also to allow rapid mathematical
searches for supposed irregular patterns that might identify troublemakers,
according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Judgments about reasonable suspicion of criminal activity are fundamentally
human judgments that cannot now be made accurately by computers," the ACLU
said in a recent position paper on the subject.

"They make it sound like such an ominous project, but it's not. It's very
open," responded Sal Hernandez, vice president of Seisint, Inc., a Boca Raton,
Fla.-based information services firm that pioneered the system and manages it
for its multistate clients. MATRIX data represent "things the cops already
have,
but it's putting it all in one place and letting the police access it
faster."

Dean Kaplan, the trucking association's president who, with his wife,
operates a local trucking firm specializing in hazardous materials transport,
said
his main concern about the system would be if its capability "gets into the
wrong hands." Seisint asserts that the system is protected by the most
advanced
online security available.

Colonel McClellan, meanwhile, said that availability of such a system could
have brought more law-enforcement attention sooner to the recent spate of
Columbus-area car shootings that included the killing Nov. 25 of Gail Knisley
on
I-270. Only after Mrs. Knisley's death did area police start comparing notes
and
realize that each had received similar reports of gunshots hitting vehicles
on I-270 and other nearby roads, he said.

A system like MATRIX would have allowed various agencies to enter what they
knew about the case and start narrowing the field of suspects sooner, he said.
Charles C. McCoy, Jr., 28, who was arrested March 17 in Las Vegas, pleaded not
guilty Monday to charges accusing him of 12 of 24 shootings dating to May,
2003.

Contact David Patch at:
dpatch at theblade.com
or 419-724-6094.

###

Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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