posted 31 March 2008: "Police agencies from Alaska and California to the Washington region have poured millions of criminal and investigative records into shared digital repositories called data warehouses, giving investigators and analysts new power to discern links among people, patterns of behavior and other hidden clues. Those network efforts will begin expanding further this month, as some local and state agencies connect to a fledgling Justice Department system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. Federal authorities hope N-DEx will become what one called a "one-stop shop" enabling federal law enforcement, counter-terrorism and intelligence analysts to automatically examine the enormous caches of local and state records for the first time..." more