An article in last Friday's Atlanta Journal and Constitution said that Georgia is the latest of three states to exit MATRIX, a federally funded data-sharing pilot project. MATRIX -- the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange -- cross-references government records with public and private databases, creating an information resource for law enforcement.
According to the article, Georgia has already sent criminal justice information to Matrix, but the costs of sending driver license information would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to the article, Alabama and Louisiana also will not participate in the MATRIX project. While law enforcement sees access to this aggregated information as valuable, Georgia encountered unexpected costs and it felt it could not cover them. A Louisiana spokesman said the potential for inaccurate data was also a concern.
