Utah lawmakers were chagrined when the state's participation came to light last January, in particular that they were kept in the dark about the program, which combines confidential state databases with hundreds of public and commercial databases. That information is then sifted by supercomputers to track criminals and thwart terrorism.

But MATRIX has provoked concerns across the nation among civil libertarians and conservative groups, who worry it has the potential to violate the privacy of law-abiding citizens. The American Civil Liberties Union has a Web page dedicated to the potential abuses of MATRIX and its ongoing battle to stop it.

Thirteen states, including Utah, signed on for the pilot program, but seven have now dropped out, some citing privacy concerns. Utah Gov. Olene Walker ordered the state to unplug from MATRIX pending a review of privacy concerns by an oversight committee.

The committee will undoubtedly look at many of the same documents obtained by Erickson to determine the extent of Utah's involvement in the program.

The documents reveal Utah officials have not been consistent about Utah's participation in MATRIX. At a press conference on Capitol Hill, Walker handed out copies of a memorandum of agreement showing Utah had signed up in mid-December 2003.

Verdi White II, Utah's head of homeland security, later admitted the state signed up on July 31, 2003.

Now, documents obtained through GRAMA show White signed an agreement to participate on Nov. 2, 2002 — 13 months before the date listed on the document handed out to news reporters.

Utah's participation in the project began much earlier than that. Minutes of an October 2002 meeting to discuss MATRIX indicate Utah was ready at that time to begin downloading its data files into the system. And one official from the Utah Department of Public Safety even made a presentation on how the state was integrating its own databases and participating in a regional data-sharing program.

White could not be reached Tuesday for comment. Leavitt, meanwhile, also has refused to comment on issues "going on under Gov. Walker. She doesn't need me interfering in her administration," he said earlier this year. "I'm not going to comment on that."

Erickson believes there is good reason why Leavitt, who heads the Environmental Protection Agency for the Bush administration, doesn't want to explain himself.

"While Jeb Bush may have been at the wheel of this thing," he said, "Mike Leavitt was clearly riding shotgun."

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E-mail: spang@desnews.com