TEXAS OBSERVER: The Governor's Database

The Governor's Database

Texas is amassing an unprecedented amount of information on its citizens

by Jake Bernstein, Texas Observer

Piece by piece, Gov. Rick Perry’s homeland security office is gathering massive amounts of information about Texas residents and merging it to create the most exhaustive centralized database in state history. Warehoused far from Texas on servers housed at a private company in Louisville, Kentucky, the Texas Data Exchange—TDEx to those in the loop—is designed to be an all-encompassing intelligence database. It is supposed to help catch criminals, ferret out terrorist cells, and allow disparate law enforcement agencies to share information. More than $3.6 million has been spent on the project so far, and it already has tens of millions of records. At least 7,000 users are presently allowed access to this information, and tens of thousands more are anticipated.

What is most striking, and disturbing, about the database is that it is not being run by the state’s highest law enforcement agency—the Texas Department of Public Safety. Instead, control of TDEx, and the power to decide who can use it, resides in the governor’s office.

That gives Perry, his staff, future governors, and their staffs potential access to a trove of sensitive data on everything from ongoing criminal investigations to police incident reports and even traffic stops. In their zeal to assemble TDEx, Perry and his homeland security director, Steve McCraw, have plunged ahead with minimal oversight from law enforcement agencies, and even DPS is skittish about the direction the project has taken.

In researching TDEx, the Observer reviewed more than a thousand pages of documents from the Office of the Governor, DPS, and the Department of Information Management. We interviewed law enforcement officials as well as McCraw. The narrative that emerged from the records—disputed by McCraw—is a headlong pursuit of control through information hoarding for a project in search of a purpose. Along the way, money has been squandered, sensitive data potentially lost, and security warnings unheeded. Read the rest of the article HERE.