A.G.
07-02-2004, 08:42 PM
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- A police officer stops you on the street, then taps something into a device in the palm of his hand.
The next minute, he knows who your relatives are, who lives in your house, who your neighbors are, the kind of car you drive or boat you own, whether you've been sued and various other tidbits about your life.
Science fiction? Hardly.
A growing number of police departments now have instant access via handheld wireless devices to vast commercial databases that contain details on just about anyone officers encounter on the beat.
In a time of terrorism worries, the information could theoretically save lives, or produce clues that an eagle-eyed cop could use to solve a case.
But placing a commercial database full of personal details at an officer's fingertips also raises troubling questions for electronic privacy activists.
"If the police went around keeping files on who you lived with and who your roommates were, I think people would be outraged," said Jay Stanley, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, "And yet in this case, they're not doing it, but they're plugging into a company that is able to do it easily."
In recent years, police departments have been testing different handheld wireless devices. Typically, they've used the devices to gain access to law enforcement databases meant only for police that, for example, alert them when someone is wanted for arrest.
At the same time, many police departments have been using desktop computers to search commercial databases to help them learn more detailed information about people they are investigating. These databases can hold billions of public records from a variety of sources. Thousands of law enforcement bodies now use them; five states have linked their own records with a huge commercial database in a federally funded program known as Matrix.
Computerized dossiers
Now, in a convergence of the two trends, police are beginning to access the commercial databases using handheld wireless devices.
LocatePLUS Holdings Corp., a Beverly, Massachusetts-based company that says it maintains more than 6 billion records and has data on 98 percent of the U.S. population, announced this week that it would provide Blackberry wireless devices to state police at Logan International Airport. Two of the planes hijacked on September 11, 2001, took off from Logan.
The officers can use the Blackberrys to access the LocatePlus database wherever and whenever they want, though the records don't include state and federal criminal justice databases or terrorist watch lists.
Such empowerment gains even more heft with Monday's ruling by a sharply divided Supreme Court that people who refuse to give their names to police can be arrested, even if they've done nothing wrong.
Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the dissenters, expressed concern ...
-UGN-
The next minute, he knows who your relatives are, who lives in your house, who your neighbors are, the kind of car you drive or boat you own, whether you've been sued and various other tidbits about your life.
Science fiction? Hardly.
A growing number of police departments now have instant access via handheld wireless devices to vast commercial databases that contain details on just about anyone officers encounter on the beat.
In a time of terrorism worries, the information could theoretically save lives, or produce clues that an eagle-eyed cop could use to solve a case.
But placing a commercial database full of personal details at an officer's fingertips also raises troubling questions for electronic privacy activists.
"If the police went around keeping files on who you lived with and who your roommates were, I think people would be outraged," said Jay Stanley, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, "And yet in this case, they're not doing it, but they're plugging into a company that is able to do it easily."
In recent years, police departments have been testing different handheld wireless devices. Typically, they've used the devices to gain access to law enforcement databases meant only for police that, for example, alert them when someone is wanted for arrest.
At the same time, many police departments have been using desktop computers to search commercial databases to help them learn more detailed information about people they are investigating. These databases can hold billions of public records from a variety of sources. Thousands of law enforcement bodies now use them; five states have linked their own records with a huge commercial database in a federally funded program known as Matrix.
Computerized dossiers
Now, in a convergence of the two trends, police are beginning to access the commercial databases using handheld wireless devices.
LocatePLUS Holdings Corp., a Beverly, Massachusetts-based company that says it maintains more than 6 billion records and has data on 98 percent of the U.S. population, announced this week that it would provide Blackberry wireless devices to state police at Logan International Airport. Two of the planes hijacked on September 11, 2001, took off from Logan.
The officers can use the Blackberrys to access the LocatePlus database wherever and whenever they want, though the records don't include state and federal criminal justice databases or terrorist watch lists.
Such empowerment gains even more heft with Monday's ruling by a sharply divided Supreme Court that people who refuse to give their names to police can be arrested, even if they've done nothing wrong.
Justice John Paul Stevens, one of the dissenters, expressed concern ...
-UGN-