MATRIX Reloaded

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today released a White Paper about the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX) program. Among the points they stress are that this alleged state-based program is in fact both funded and managed by the federal Department of Homeland Security; and that it contains controversial "data mining" aspect that helped scuttle the planned Total Information Awareness program.

From the ACLU press release announcing the paper:

Another document obtained by the ACLU indicated that Matrix operators sent to federal law enforcement authorities a list of 120,000 names of individuals who had been scored with a high "terrorism quotient." Seisint, the company that operates Matrix, claimed that scores of arrests resulted from the list.

Among the considerations that go into the terrorism quotient, according to a Seisint presentation discussed in the White Paper, are age and gender; credit history; ethnicity; "pilots or associations to pilots"; Social Security number anomalies; and how they ship and receive packages.