NADDIS

A NADDIS check is the first step in any criminal drug inquiry and reveals the existence of any prior reports of investigation or mention in any file of an individual, business, airfield, plane, vessel or phone number.[3] The existence of a NADDIS record on an individual has been employed to provide probable cause for airport searches, surveillance and home entries.[4] By contrast, the absence of a NADDIS record has been grounds for permitting bond for criminal defendants.

NADDIS also is routinely used by DEA and other agencies to conduct background checks on prospective employees, contractors and informants,[5] with a NADDIS check in one instance revealing a DEA database contractor's prior involvement in drug trafficking.[6]

NADDIS logs the access of NADDIS by any authorized DEA employee and records the time, date, location and identity of the employee who requested access to a particular file. These access logs or "detail reports" have been utilized by DEA Headquarters to identify DEA employees who provided NADDIS records to criminal organizations or who have improperly accessed NADDIS21. Agencies' access logs have also been considered by district courts in resolving legal issues over the timing of agents' and prosecutors' awareness of investigative records on a subject. Thus, the use of NADDIS detail reports to detect government improprieties is similar to the use of other law enforcement database access logs in demonstrating police misconduct. For example, in Kansas the FBI's Interstate Identification Index (III) access log confirmed improper access by a sheriff who conducted criminal history checks against political opponents.

Efforts through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain a sample NADDIS record have often been rejected by DEA. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has indicated its concerns about the "scanty" secondary literature on NADDIS, further noting that although it would be helpful "to know something about NADDIS", "the government has successfully opposed efforts to obtain discovery aimed at determining the character and reliability" of the system.[7] There are few news articles discussing NADDIS,[8] and only one criminology journal article discussing a failed request for NADDIS information.[9] However, a few recent web-based documents involving DEA contractors have provided insight into the structure of NADDIS. In response to a FOIA request for NADDIS data by a criminologist for research purposes, DEA previously has provided only a sealed, non-public "'live' (simulated) NADDIS printout" for review by the district court in camera.[10][11]

NADDIS has increasingly been employed and shared by multiple federal agencies post-9/11. NADDIS is likely to be included in the datasets of the more than 53 government agencies now contributing records to FBI's Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW) and the DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement Pattern Analysis and Information Collection (ICEPIC) system. As an effective tool in the detection of terrorism-related heroin trafficking, NADDIS may be used to link Taliban-influenced Afghan government officials and heroin sources in Afghanistan for purposes of selective enforcement, more efficient allocation of federal agencies' resources, reduction of corruption, and for study and analysis of the terrorism-narcotics nexus. NADDIS is becoming an even more significant contributor to the intelligence community's (IC) datamarts for federal and international agencies' characterization of nascent and existing major violent narcotics organizations linked to terrorism. NADDIS through FOIA now is accessible to criminal justice policy researchers concerned with selective enforcement methods, violent crime demographics, drug epidemics and the impact of information-sharing on personal privacy and civil liberties.