A consortium of Alaskan law enforcement agencies today announced a new information sharing initiative that uses the commercially-available Coplink system to analyze disparate pieces of data for investigative leads

Seven agencies, including the Alaska Department of Safety and the Juneau and Anchorage police departments, participate in the Alaska Law Enforcement Information Sharing System (ALEISS). The organization will get federal funding for the first phase of the Coplink initiative. The state, along with the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center — Northwest — part of the Justice Department's National Institute of Justice and based in Anchorage — will administer the funds. As part of the effort, agencies will establish privacy, security and responsibility protocols for using the system. Coplink, created in 1998 at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona at Tucson, can churn through vast quantities of unstructured information from various databases — such as sex offender, gang-related, mug shots, records management system, court citations, tax records, and even pawn broker records — to detect trends. Users can search for leads by entering an individual's physical characteristics or name, an automobile description and other information. Algorithms can provide links between data and spit out probable leads for investigators to look into further. The system, developed and marketed by Knowledge Computing Corporation, operates through a secure intranet and can assign different levels of access to users, based on the sensitivity of the information. It creates a detailed audit trail for every search. ALEISS employees will be subject to background screenings — including fingerprint checks of state and federal criminal history repositories — before getting access to the system An employee with any type of felony conviction will be denied access to Coplink.