Long-time Defense Tech readers will be familiar with MATRIX -- the data-mining project, run by 10 state governments, that's eerily similar to Total Information Awareness.
Now, the ACLU has a rundown of this creepy program, which combs through credit card transactions, marriage records, and vehicle registration data to find alleged evil-doers. This report based mostly on newspaper articles. But it's the most complete profile to date of this largely-hidden program.
MATRIX (short for "Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange") "is designed not only to build dossiers on all of our lives so they will be a keystroke away for police and other government officials, but also to search through our dossiers and those of others in a hunt for patterns indicative of terrorist or other criminal activity," the report notes.
"Its scary," says Phil Ramer, the intelligence chief for Florida, which is taking the lead on MATRIX. "It could be abused. I mean, I can call up everything about you, your pictures and pictures of your neighbors."
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