Sunday, August 31, 2003
The system has the potential to stop would-be terrorists, officials said.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- Pennsylvania law-enforcement officials say they hope a new 24-hour computerized intelligence-sharing system will reduce information barriers between agencies and help stop criminals and track suspicious people.
The Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center, which came online July 14 and is operated by the state police, is intended to cull more publicly available files as well as intelligence and investigative data from other law-enforcement agencies.
"It's not a crystal ball, but it is a very powerful tool," Maj. Frank Pawlowski, the director of the state police's criminal investigation bureau, said Wednesday.
How it works
Now, every local patrolman or FBI agent in Pennsylvania can fax, telephone, or e-mail a group of state police intelligence analysts on staff around the clock and request information on a particular individual, or information that could help identify an individual.
Those state police analysts, in turn, can log onto a real-time Internet "chat room." There, they can contact analysts from a variety of multistate and federal agencies that operate or have access to databases and can then pull up information pertinent to the original officer's request.
Although the system can be used to track common criminals at a traffic stop, state and federal law-enforcement officials at a Capitol news conference stressed its potential to stop would-be terrorists.
"It represents a very dramatic step forward in the war on terrorism in being more predictive and proactive," said Jeffrey Lampinski, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Philadelphia bureau.
State police superintendent Col. Jeffrey B. Miller called it a "one-stop shop" of information that also could be used to identify trends and produce alerts and briefs for law-enforcement agencies.
The system will be paid for by a $600,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency, as well as the current state police budget, and will require the addition of two dozen intelligence personnel.
Officers previously have had computer access to a database run by the FBI's National Crime Information Center, which includes data about terrorists, fugitives, warrants, people missing, gang members and stolen vehicles, guns or boats.
But the new system adds access to databases run by, among other agencies, a 13-state anti-terrorism task force, a national tactical drug intelligence center, and the federal Defense Intelligence Agency, which in turn can access CIA and Interpol databases, state police said.
It will be up to each individual officer whether to request information from the state police analysts, and those analysts can vet the request to ensure that it is necessary, Pawlowski said.
The system, however, by no means covers every police department in the country, or even the state. For instance, every department and agency has different criteria for what it sends to the databases, and departments have different capacities for computerizing information, so some information will never make it into the databases.
"There are departments that have paper files that we'll never be able to search," Pawlowski said. "This is real-time with certain limitations. This is as real-time as you can get."
State police think the information-sharing system could prevent another terrorist strike like the Sept. 11 attacks.
The system, they say, can reveal if someone is wanted in another country or under investigation for a major crime in another state, or has been casing likely terrorist targets such as nuclear plants.
It will also be up to individual police departments to add information to the system. Files that are collected on suspicious people would be eliminated after a period of time if the people are deemed to be harmless, Pawlowski said.
XON THE NET: Pennsylvania State Police: www.psp.state.pa.us