Texas Gov. Rick Perry's Dangerous Database

Piece by piece, Gov. Rick Perry's homeland security office is gathering massive amounts of information about Texas residents and merging it to create the most exhaustive centralized database in state history. Warehoused far from Texas on servers housed at a private company in Louisville, Kentucky, the Texas Data Exchange -- TDEx to those in the loop -- is designed to be an all-encompassing intelligence database. It is supposed to help catch criminals, ferret out terrorist cells, and allow disparate law enforcement agencies to share information. More than $3.6 million has been spent on the project so far, and it already has tens of millions of records. At least 7,000 users are presently allowed access to this information, and tens of thousands more are anticipated.

What is most striking, and disturbing, about the database is that it is not being run by the states highest law enforcement agency -- the Texas Department of Public Safety. Instead, control of TDEx, and the power to decide who can use it, resides in the governor's office.

That gives Perry, his staff, future governors, and their staffs potential access to a trove of sensitive data on everything from ongoing criminal investigations to police incident reports and even traffic stops. In their zeal to assemble TDEx, Perry and his homeland security director, Steve McCraw, have plunged ahead with minimal oversight from law enforcement agencies, and even DPS is skittish about the direction the project has taken.

In researching TDEx, the Texas Observer reviewed more than a thousand pages of documents from the Office of the Governor, DPS, and the Department of Information Management. We interviewed law enforcement officials as well as McCraw. The narrative that emerged from the records -- disputed by McCraw -- is a headlong pursuit of control through information hoarding for a project in search of a purpose. Along the way, money has been squandered, sensitive data potentially lost, and security warnings unheeded.

If information is power, Perry and his successors are about to become powerful in ways that are scaring civil libertarians, and probably should alarm every Texan.

Texas agencies already have plenty of information on all of us -- driver's licenses, fingerprints, and proofs of address, details we provide every time we renew our licenses, register a car, or vote. Then there's every brush with the law, all the criminal convictions, prison records, and so forth. Much of that information is now scattered about in different agencies and locations. Never has it been pulled together for the ease of access that TDEx promises.

There's also a less discernible realm of information that should perhaps concern the citizens of Texas more. In the course of doing their work, police agencies vacuum up enormous piles of tips, rumors, innuendo, guesses, false reports, and other useless material that they sift through to solve crimes and identify criminals.

Access to this massive trove of information -- files on cases in progress, notes about "persons of interest"who may prove to be of no interest at all, details involving confidential informants -- is closely guarded for good reason. Information worthless for solving a crime might be useful in other contexts. Like politics or personal revenge. The potential for abuse explains why access to existing federal and state crime databases is normally strictly controlled. Over the years -- in the wake of scandals like J. Edgar Hoover's secret FBI files and the increasing privatization of computer databases -- federal regulations have evolved to ensure the safety of information and accountability for its use. Keeping a tight rein on who can access raw investigative data, and for what purposes, is supposed to prevent abuses large and small -- from high officials who might misuse information for political purposes down to small town deputies who might be willing to sell information, or use it to track down an ex-wife's new boyfriend.