Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union both in Utah and the national headquarters in New York say they can't be sure how deep the state is involved because the state has ignored requests for information. "What is Utah collecting? We have been trying to find that out for weeks," said Jay Stanley, ACLU national spokesman.

Stanley said a Freedom of Information request was submitted Nov. 18, 2003, but there has been no reply. The Utah ACLU also submitted a state records request to learn what records are being compiled, who has access, the number of times MATRIX has been used, the circumstances under which it has been used and what procedures are in place to assure privacy.

"It seems to us this kind of system has enormous implications for American freedom," Stanley said. "It should not be like pulling teeth to get information about how it is going to work."

White said the information should be turned over to the ACLU this week and that officials had been in touch with ACLU attorneys.

Stanley worries that MATRIX combines private police records with commercially available data compiled by a multibillion-dollar industry that specializes in "data mining."

"They claim to cover 98 percent of Americans — you, your neighbors, your family members, your demographics, your lifestyle and purchasing habits," he said.

It isn't clear whether legislative leaders would have even recognized those concerns within a federal grant to set up a test information-sharing program between the states and federal government.

House Speaker Marty Stephens, R-Farr West, said Leavitt "mentioned" the program to leaders as part of Homeland Security discussions last year. But MATRIX apparently was never brought to the Executive Appropriations Committee as a specific discussion, either last session or during the interim.

"I don't know a lot about it or how it works," said Stephens, "and I never heard of any of these concerns."

A bigger concern is that Big Brother could be watching every move, every purchase, every wrong turn.

"Do I want the government compiling all these records on me through a super database to come up with a dossier?" queried one legislative staffer who should have known about MATRIX but didn't. "Not only no, but hell no."

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