A report published on Tuesday by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General confirmed that a branch of the US military operates an enormous law enforcement database containing hundreds of millions of records of interactions between cops and citizens.
The IG investigation described the info depository, run by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, as containing more than 506 million police records, including information about American citizens who’ve committed crimes as insignificant as driving infractions.
The probe was launched in response to a March 2014 Washington Examiner story that first described the scope of the Navy’s recordkeeping system, known as the Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LInX.
“The allegations of NCIS owning and maintaining these databases…as reported in the Washington Examiner were correct,” Deputy Inspector Anthony Thomas said in a memo describing the conclusions of the investigation.
The IG also confirmed the depth of the databases, which, according to the deputy IG, “contain many records of United States Persons not affiliated with DoD.”
The IG’s findings, however, took exception with the points raised in the Examiner that the database amounts to yet another domestic spying operation run out of the federal government.
“Allegations of a possible questionable intelligence activity are not substantiated confirming the existence of the database,” the inspector general claims, noting that it “there is no indication intelligence components of the DoD Intelligence Agencies have direct access to LInX.”
The report adds that individuals using LInX do not have “direct access to records in which they do not have record ownership”
Just the existence of the database, however, could spark concerns of government intrusion—just as the existence of a massive telephone records database at the National Security Agency has sparked a two-year debate about spying authorities.
In the Examiner’s initial reporting, a member of the Defense Department’s Legal Policy Board, Eugene Fiddell saw the dystopic potential of the Naval database.
“Clearly, it cannot be right that any part of the Navy is collecting traffic citation information,” he said, adding that it “sounds like something from a third-world country, where you have powerful military intelligence watching everybody.”
The IG report doesn’t offer any additional answers to questions raised by the paper, including how the database ended up in the hands of the Navy, and why the number of records stored within it has drastically increased from 50 million in 2007 to over 500 million in today.
A separate database, which contains information about defense department criminal investigations, is also operated by NCIS.
On its website, NCIS describes LInX as an initiative to “enhance information sharing between, local, state, and federal law enforcement in the areas of strategic important to the Department of the Navy.”
The agency boasts that LInX has access to over 4,000 data sources, including 1,300 participating law enforcement agencies, and a “cooperative agreement” with the FBI.
