Security database worries human rights activists

Washington: The Justice Department is building a massive database that allows state and local police officers around the country to search millions of case files from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal law enforcement agencies, according to Justice officials.

The system, known as "OneDOJ", already holds approximately one million case records and is projected to triple in size over the next three years, Justice officials said. The files include investigative reports, criminal-history information, details on offences, and the names, addresses and other information about criminal suspects or targets, officials said.

The database is billed by its supporters as a much-needed step toward better information-sharing with local law enforcement agencies, which have long complained about a lack of cooperation from the federal government.

Concerns

But civil liberties and privacy advocates say the scale and contents of such a database raise immediate privacy and civil rights concerns, in part because tens of thousands of local police officers could gain access to personal details about people who have not been arrested or charged with crimes.

The little-noticed programme has been coming together over the last year and a half. It already is in use in pilot projects with local police in Seattle, San Diego and a handful of other areas, officials said. About 150 separate police agencies have access, officials said.

But in a memorandum sent last week to the FBI, US attorneys and other senior Justice officials, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty announced that the programme will be expanded immediately to 15 additional regions, and that federal authorities will "accelerate ... efforts to share information from both open and closed cases".

Eventually, the department hopes, the database will be a central mechanism for sharing federal law enforcement information with local and state investigators, who now run checks individually, and often manually, with Justice Department's main law enforcement agencies.