WASHINGTON, Aug 10: Some civil liberties and Muslim advocacy groups on Sunday said that a new counter-terrorism database being introduced in Florida could hurt minorities.

They said that it could lower the threshold for government snooping because it allowed fast and unhindered access to personal information.

The Florida police, however, say the database is designed to give law enforcement agencies a powerful new tool to analyze billions of records about criminals.

Civil liberties groups point out that the database also allows police access to data about ordinary Americans.

The system, called Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before. It combs police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults.

The state-level programme, aided by federal funding, is poised to expand across the United States.

But civil rights activists hope that Congressmen will also question the “unsavoury aspects,” as one of them said, of the database when the federal government tries to adopt it.

Congress has been very critical of similar information gathering systems on the federal level, such as a Pentagon-supported plan for global surveillance and an air-passenger-screening system.

The Department of Homeland Security announced earlier this week plans to launch a pilot law enforcement data-sharing network that will include Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York.