The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has built a database with more than 659 million records - including terrorist watch lists, intelligence cables and financial transactions - taken from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

The FBI demonstrated the database, one of the most powerful data analysis tools available to law enforcement and counterterrorism agents, to the media on Tuesday in part to address criticism that its technology was failing and outdated as the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks nears, the report said.

The Investigative Data Warehouse is being launched in an effort to "connect the dots" that the FBI was accused of missing in the months before the 2001 attacks, officials were quoted as saying.

About a quarter of the information comes from the FBI's records and criminal case files, and the rest, including suspicious financial activity reports, no-fly lists, and lost and stolen passport data, comes from the Treasury, State and Homeland Security departments and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The system, designed by Chiliad Inc. of Amherst, Massachusetts, can be programmed to send alerts on new information to agents, said Gurvais Grigg, acting director of the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, who helped develop the system.

Names, Social Security numbers and driving license details can be linked and cross-matched across hundreds of millions of records.

Before 2002, it would take 32,222 hours to run 1,000 names and birth dates across 50 databases. Now agents can make such a search in 30 minutes or less, Grigg said.

The 13,000 agents and analysts who use the system make an average 1 million queries a month, he said.

Privacy advocates said the data base, launched in January 2004, raises concerns about how long the government stores such information and about the rights of citizens to know what records are kept, according to the report.

But FBI officials said the database is in "full compliance" with the law, the report said.

Source: Xinhua