The goal: to link public and law enforcement databases across many jurisdictions and states to ease investigations of criminals ranging from sex predators to terrorists.

"It is a powerful system. Not scary, not frightening, but much more efficient," said Bill Shrewsbury, a former cop and now vice president of Seisint Inc., in Boca Raton, Fla., the company that developed the system. "Law enforcement has got to have a tool to do this job."

Quick and efficient

To use MATRIX, an analyst types a query into the system's Factual Analysis Criminal Threat Solution — or FACTS — electronic form. The query zips through a secure electronic connection and combs through innumerable ones and zeros within several parallel supercomputers, returning in seconds with a list of names or other information.

MATRIX's capabilities would come in handy, say, in helping nab a kidnapper, White said.

Say a witness to a child abduction caught a glimpse of only part of the assailant's license plate. In the past, law enforcement officers would plug the partial information into their own databases to turn up possible hits. If they wanted to search other states' driver's license divisions, registration records and criminal histories, they'd have had to go through each, one by one.

It could take weeks, White said.

But with MATRIX, participating states' information banks can be examined in a fraction of the time.

"It's information for law enforcement exclusively; no one has access to this except law enforcement, and it's the same information we've had access to forever," White said. "It makes it so we can apprehend a criminal much faster, and therefore we should be able to save lives and property."

Police say the system is used only to assist criminal investigations, not to make random searches. MATRIX is overseen by an executive committee with representatives from Florida, Georgia, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The system is monitored by review boards that conduct random audits and can bring criminal charges if MATRIX is misused.

Every snippet of information in MATRIX resides deep inside a closed Intranet system protected by a secret code and numerous passwords and firewalls. Florida is the only state in the program that fully employs MATRIX, and the FDLE is in charge of protecting the system.

"I think we have gone way overboard for security of this kind of system," said Phil Ramer, the FDLE's special agent in charge of statewide intelligence.

Florida scams

The case against Nelson and his partner began when FDLE agents started investigating a mobile group suspected of running scams in Florida.