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Alaska Adopts
Criminal Data Mining
10/21/03 ---
Federal Computer Week
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BY Dibya Sarkar
A consortium of Alaskan
law enforcement agencies today announced a new information sharing
initiative that uses the commercially-available COPLINK®
system to analyze disparate pieces of data for investigative leads.
Seven agencies, including the Alaska Department of Safety and the Juneau
and Anchorage police departments, participate in the Alaska Law
Enforcement Information Sharing System (ALEISS). The organization will get
federal funding for the first phase of the COPLINK®
initiative.
The state, along with the National Law Enforcement and Corrections
Technology Center — Northwest — part of the Justice Department's National
Institute of Justice and based in Anchorage — will administer the funds.
As part of the effort, agencies will establish privacy, security and
responsibility protocols for using the system.
COPLINK®, created in
1998 at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona at
Tucson, can churn through vast quantities of unstructured information from
various databases — such as sex offender, gang-related, mug shots, records
management system, court citations, tax records, and even pawn broker
records — to detect trends.
Users can search for leads by entering an individual's physical
characteristics or name, an automobile description and other information.
Algorithms can provide links between data and spit out probable leads for
investigators to look into further.
The system, developed and marketed by Knowledge Computing Corporation,
operates through a secure intranet and can assign different levels of
access to users, based on the sensitivity of the information. It creates a
detailed audit trail for every search.
ALEISS employees will be subject to background screenings — including
fingerprint checks of state and federal criminal history repositories —
before getting access to the system An employee with any type of felony
conviction will be denied access to COPLINK®.
COPLINK® is being
used in various jurisdictions across the country, including Tucson, where it was
tested.
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