Waddoups said MATRIX may indeed be a valuable tool to help law enforcement thwart crime and terrorism, but sometimes issues rise to the level where public concern outweighs the advantages.

"Just the name alone may doom this project in our state," he said, a reference to the fact the database shares its name with a popular sci-fi movie where supercomputers rule the planet.

Capt. Mitch McKee and the Utah Department of Public Safety pleaded with the committee not to "punish the victims of crime and victims of terrorism" by taking away the MATRIX tool, which allows police to sift through billions of pieces of information in minutes.

"Don't buy into the inaccuracies of what the media has spread and continues to spread," he said.

If punishments are to be meted out by the committee, McKee said they should be directed at those individuals who did not properly explain the program to lawmakers. But unplugging the state would be rewarding criminals and terrorists by taking away an effective tool of law enforcement, he said.

McKee said MATRIX emerged in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, climate when terrorism investigators were being asked why they did not "connect the dots" to identify the terrorists before they killed thousands in New York City and Washington, D.C. And MATRIX — a combination of confidential, public and corporate databases — became a tool to process information in a matter of minutes that would otherwise take days or weeks.

It was funded by federal grants from the Department of Homeland Security and was coordinated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in partnership with a private technology firm.

Leavitt, apparently through his role in the National Governor's Association, was a champion of MATRIX and encouraged other governors to join. Originally, 13 states, including Utah, were involved in the pilot program. Only four of the original participants remain in the program, most withdrawing because of the roughly $2 million annual price tag or privacy concerns or both.

There are also concerns MATRIX is an "end run" around federal laws that prohibit domestic spying — laws that emerged in the early 1970s in the wake of revelations the government had been spying on anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and others with unpopular views. Two years ago, Congress killed a supercomputer database proposed for the Department of Defense because of concerns it could be used to revive domestic spying.