"I've never shown it to any law enforcement people who didn't say: 'My goodness, this is unbelievable technology. It makes our job so much easier,'" said Shrewsbury, a former agent with Florida state police and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

He added, however, that if too much controversy follows the project, "all bets are off."

The minutes of a MATRIX board meeting held Nov. 5 in Atlanta show the attendance of representatives from the seven states participating in MATRIX at the time, as well as the federal departments of Homeland Security and Justice, and four other states — Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and West Virginia.

Officials in West Virginia and Colorado said Friday their states had since decided not to participate. West Virginia cited the cost.

MATRIX was launched with $12 million in federal funds, but the documents obtained by the AP indicate each participating state could be forced to spend as much as $1.8 million per year. Shrewsbury said the long-term cost could be significantly lower.

Arizona's top cop, Dennis Garrett, signed a detailed MATRIX security agreement Dec. 16 that paves the way for police in eight Western states to connect to the MATRIX if they choose, through a secure computer network that they share and Arizona oversees. But Arizona officials did not say whether the state remains interested in MATRIX for itself.

Dennis Schrader, Maryland's homeland security director, said the state eventually will have some type of "data-mining tool" to pool information and would not rule out MATRIX.

The meeting minutes quote Florida state police Phil Ramer, an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who is overseeing the project, as saying North Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama and Iowa were invited but didn't attend.

Officials in Iowa and North Carolina said Friday that they were exploring joining MATRIX, while Alabama said it was too expensive.

For now, at least 450 law enforcement agents, mainly in Florida, have access to MATRIX. Zadra said federal investigators from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and other agencies would be among those eligible for access.

As many as 13 states originally planned to be in MATRIX, including California, whose attorney general says the system offends "fundamental rights of privacy."

Other states expressed worries about security. An open-records request in Georgia uncovered an Oct. 2 memo, for example, in which motor-vehicle department staffers noted that Seisint had promised "that every effort will be taken to make the database and the data transfer safe and secure. However, the potential for abuse still exists."