Don't Enter the Matrix
The Rocky Mountain News' Linda Seebach writes up our June issue but, more interestingly, throws in a bunch of information about the aborted Matrix airline-passenger-profiling program. She writes:
The Associated Press reported May 20 that a data-sharing pilot project called Matrix (for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) had demonstrated for federal and state officials, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, a "high terrorist factor" scoring system.
Sorting through 4 billion records, it came up with the names of the 120,000 people with the highest scores and sent them to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI and other agencies.
The company developing the scoring system, Seisint Inc., claimed that a number of arrests were made as a result.
Creepy? Unconstitutional? Would you feel better about it if you knew the company also claimed that among the 80 people with the highest scores, five were among the 9/11 hijackers?
