NEW YORK (AP) – The format of a crime and terrorism database known as Matrix is being changed to allay privacy and legal concerns that led several states to drop out of the federally funded project.

As it stands now, the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange combines state vehicle and crime records with commercial databases owned by a private company, Seisint Inc., giving investigators quick access to billions of pieces of information on potential suspects.

The $12 million pilot project originally was to include 13 states, covering half the U.S. population. Several dropped out because of privacy concerns or questions about the legality of sending state-owned records to Seisint’s supercomputers.

Five remaining Matrix states – Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania – will now try a method in which each state will maintain its own records, said Mark Zadra, chief investigator for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which has official responsibility for the program. Software will search each state’s records as necessary, he said.

The new setup is designed to allow for more frequent updates of the information and get around obstacles in some states’ data laws, Zadra said. The new model also will let investigators sharpen their searches, asking the system to check records in only one state, for example.

“I think it would be attractive to states that might be looking to join,” Zadra said Friday. “The more states that would join, the better chance we have at putting missing pieces together.”

One prominent Matrix critic said the new model wouldn’t alleviate his fears that the system could give law enforcement unprecedented access to details about innocent people.

“Decentralized data which is just as easily accessed as centralized data creates the same privacy problems,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Steinhardt also said he was concerned that Boca Raton, Fla.-based Seisint is being bought by Anglo-Dutch publishing group Reed Elsevier, which plans to combine Seisint with LexisNexis, its unit for legal, business and government information.

Steinhardt said the combination raises the possibility a huge range of personal information held by LexisNexis could make its way into Matrix.

Matrix organizers have pledged the system is limited to information they have always been able to obtain without a warrant. They say they have rejected broader applications such as a technology Seisint developed that assigned a terrorism-likelihood score to individuals based on data about them.

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On the Net:

http://www.matrix-at.org

http://www.aclu.org/privacy

AP-ES-07-16-04 2035EDT

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