MassPrivateI A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person’s name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military.
The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed 506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.
LinX is a national information-sharing hub for federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. It is run by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, raising concerns among some military law experts that putting such detailed data about ordinary citizens in the hands of military officials crosses the line that generally prohibits the armed forces from conducting civilian law enforcement operations.
Those fears are heightened by recent disclosures of the National Security Agency spying on Americans, and the CIA allegedly spying on Congress, they say.
Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale Law School, called LinX “domestic spying.”
“It gives me the willies,” said Fidell, a member of the Defense Department’s Legal Policy Board and a board member of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War.
Fidell reviewed the Navy’s LinX website at the request of the Washington Examiner to assess the propriety of putting such a powerful database under the control of a military police entity.
“Clearly, it cannot be right that any part of the Navy is collecting traffic citation information,” Fidell said. “This sounds like something from a third-world country, where you have powerful military intelligence watching everybody.”
Background checks for gun sales and applications for concealed weapons permits are not included in the system, according to NCIS officials and representatives of major state and local agencies contacted by the Examiner.
NCIS officials could not say how much has been spent on LinX since it was created 2003. They provided figures since the 2008 fiscal year totaling $42.3 million. Older records are not available from NCIS.
Incomplete data from USAspending.gov shows at least $7.2 million more was spent between 2003 and 2008. The actual figure is probably much higher, since the spending listed on the disclosure site only totals $23 million since 2003.
Other law enforcement databases have limited information on things like criminal histories, said Kris Peterson, LinX division chief at NCIS.
The rules governing LinX are almost identical to those controlling other federal databases run by the FBI, he said.
While NCIS is a military police unit, its agents are civilian employees equivalent to those at the FBI and other federal agencies, said NCIS spokesman Ed Buice.
More detailed narratives and things like radio dispatch logs and pawn shop records don’t show up in those databases, but are available in LinX, he said.
Participating agencies must feed their information into the federal data warehouse and electronically update it daily in return for access. (Agencies such as the FBI/DHS)
Why LinX wound up in the NCIS, a military law enforcement agency, is not clear. Current NCIS officials could not explain the reasoning, other than to say it grew out of the department’s need for access to law enforcement records relevant to criminal investigations.
Since the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, it has been illegal for the military to engage in domestic law enforcement except in limited circumstances, such as quelling insurrections.
The limits in the law were largely undefined for almost a century. In 1973, the Army provided logistical support for FBI agents trying to break the standoff with American Indian Movement militants at Wounded Knee, S.D.
Several criminal defendants later argued the use of the military was illegal under Posse Comitatus.
Ensuing court decisions decreed that using the military for direct policing, such as making arrests or conducting searches, was illegal and should be left to civilian departments. Providing logistical support, equipment and information are allowed.
Since then, the law has been loosened to allow limited military participation in certain large-scale anti-drug investigations.
Aside from the legal issues is the problem of “mission creep,” said Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute and an Examiner columnist, who has written about the overreach of the militaryin civilian law enforcement.
What begins as a well-meaning and limited effort to assist local police can grow into a powerful threat to constitutional protections, Healy said.
A recent example of mission-creep gone awry is the Threat And Local Observation Notice, or TALON, program created by the Air Force at the same time LinX was launched.
Like LinX, TALON’s purpose was to create a network for information-sharing among federal, state and local police agencies that could be used to help protect military facilities.
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