Al Nelson had no idea police were watching him last April when he allegedly tried to scam an elderly woman into paying him $2,800 for spraying bogus sealant on the roof of her Tampa, Fla., home.

As Nelson and his partner shouted demands at the woman, police and an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement moved in and arrested both men.

"They were shocked," recalled FDLE agent Dennis Russo.

Russo was in the right place at the right time because of a powerful tool called MATRIX — for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange.

The Intranet system is being tested by eight states, including Utah, as part of a pilot program that combines a wide variety of public and law enforcement databases, allowing law enforcement agents to quickly search addresses, Social Security numbers, credit-card records, criminal histories, driver's license files, property records and other databases to quickly track down suspects.

Searching the databases one at a time to nab Nelson would have taken FDLE analyst Mary Lattig weeks. Using MATRIX, it took a little over a day.

"We were able to find these people so quickly it was astonishing," Lattig said. "We can get so much more done so much more quickly."

But MATRIX has drawn fire from members of civil liberties groups who say its purpose is largely undefined. They note that MATRIX offers unprecedented access to information about average citizens.

"I think it is a dangerous system," said Jim Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group in Washington, D.C. "You could be looking at purely lawful conduct, trying to infer illegal intent from legal behavior."

Broad applications

MATRIX originally was conceived as a tool to fight terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sept. 11 hijackers were able to avoid detection largely because law enforcement officials had no way to rapidly compile and share what they knew about the men.

But it quickly became clear that MATRIX had broad applications for law enforcement agencies across the country.

Besides Utah, the pilot program includes Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Michigan, Georgia, Florida and Connecticut — and is financed by $12 million in grant money from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. It is scheduled to conclude in November 2004.

Utah's pilot began in the past month or two, said Verdi White II, deputy commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety, which started looking into MATRIX about a year ago. In all, 35 state and local investigators will be trained to use the system here, he said.