Police have billions of files at hand

By Martin Finucane
Associated Press

Hand-held wireless devices give police instant access to databases that contain details on just about anyone they meet. Associated Press

The next minute, he knows who your relatives are, who lives in your house, who your neighbors are, the kind of car you drive, whether you've been sued and various other tidbits about your life.

Science fiction? Hardly.

A growing number of police departments now have instant access via hand-held wireless devices to vast commercial databases that contain details on just about anyone officers encounter on the beat.

In a time of terrorism worries, the information could theoretically save lives, or produce clues that an eagle-eyed cop could use to solve a case.

But placing a commercial database full of personal details at an officer's fingertips also raises troubling questions for electronic privacy activists.

"If the police went around keeping files on who you lived with and who your roommates were, I think people would be outraged," said Jay Stanley, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union. "And yet in this case, they're not doing it, but they're plugging into a company that is able to do it easily."

In recent years, police departments have been testing different hand-held wireless devices. Typically, they've used the devices to gain access to law enforcement databases meant only for police that, for example, alert them when someone is wanted for arrest.

At the same time, many police departments have been using desktop computers to search commercial databases to help them learn more detailed information about people they are investigating. These databases can hold billions of public records from a variety of sources. Thousands of law enforcement bodies use them; five states have linked their records with a huge commercial database in a federally financed program, Matrix.

Now, in a convergence of the two trends, police are beginning to access the commercial databases using hand-held wireless devices.

LocatePLUS Holdings Corp., a Beverly, Mass.-based company that says it maintains more than 6 billion records and has data on 98 percent of the U.S. population, announced this week that it would provide Blackberry wireless devices to state police at Logan International Airport in Boston. Two of the planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, took off from Logan.

Officers can use the Blackberrys to access the LocatePlus database wherever and whenever they want, though the records don't include state and federal criminal justice databases or terrorist watch lists.

Such empowerment gains even more heft with a recent ruling by a sharply divided Supreme Court that people who refuse to give their names to police can be arrested, even if they've done nothing wrong.

LocatePlus has more than 50 law enforcement agency customers that use wireless hand-helds to access its database, said chief executive Jon Latorella.

Latorella said the company's database takes information from registries of motor vehicles, credit bureaus, property tax departments, telephone directories (even unlisted numbers) and courts to create computerized dossiers on people.

ChoicePoint Inc., based in Alpharetta, Ga., also offers police wireless access to its vast databases, but so far has a smaller number of clients, said James E. Lee, the company's chief marketing officer.

Massachusetts State Police Lt. Thomas Coffey said he felt the LocatePLUS service would be useful.

Privacy activists argue, however, that information collected for one purpose shouldn't be used for others. They call for federal standards on the access and use of data as well as mechanisms to prevent abuse.