Comment on FR Doc # E7-19458

There are few things more important to internal national security than ensuring cooperation between all levels of law enforcement to the greatest degree possible. While there may be concerns about civil liberty violations, those who choose to break the law seem suspect in decrying a database designed to stave off future criminal endeavors. The N-DEx system seems uniquely equipped to bridge gaps that law enforcement personnel may encounter when investigating an interstate criminal investigation. To be able to investigate a subject in depth without alerting the subject or affording said subject possible avenues of scuttling an investigation seems to flirt with 4th Amendment protections but not to violate them. When investigating a crime reactively, time lost to a bureaucratic quagmire may be the cost of doing business. But when investigating proactively, time is of the essence and anything to speed that along seems to be a move in the right direction. In doing research and investigating, information that may seem initially irrelevant may later become so. This being the case, it seems fitting that an investigator using N-DEx should not be encumbered in obtaining information known to other law enforcement agencies and instead can browse or search all tangentially related material. The fact that the proposed rule calls for ?robust audit procedures? seems to allay any fears one might have of N-DEx abuse. Having read the proposed rule, it seems commendable and most assuredly necessary that the N-DEx database be exempted from the Privacy Act of 1974.