Fbi Computers Enter The 21St Century
The FBI is attempting to modernize its computer systems with the $600 million Trilogy network, while civil liberties proponents are keeping a close eye on the project to see if it strikes a balance between privacy and security-related information gathering.
The network will feature a new database designed to infer relationships between 26 million agency records; the database can store 100 Terabyte (TB=1,024 Gigabytes) of data culled from federal, state, and local law enforcement as well as news media.
Audio, video, and 3D mapping files will also be stored within the database, while the FBI’s Virtual Case File, used to track terrorists and other offenders, will be made available to all authorized employees by December.
Although FBI executive assistant director Wilson Lowery says the system will only include legally obtained information, privacy advocates are concerned that the massive amount of data in the system will be rife with inaccuracies.
Furthermore, some of the data may come from the National Crime Information Center, which was recently exempted from the Privacy Act of 1974.
Trilogy features a search engine that can carry out natural-language queries and chart or map out relationships between suspected criminals, while its scope covers almost 600 Web sites.
Trilogy was conceived as early as 1999, and was revised in 2001 to incorporate more security safeguards. T
he FBI’s Paul Bresson says the next phase of the Trilogy project will be to make the system’s information accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Medill News Service (04/03/03); Wenzel, Elsa M.
