As long as computers have  been  used by the Federal, State,

          and Local governments people  have  realized  their potential not

          only as a means of making complicated  calculations but also as a

          highly sophisticated means of storing and retriving large amounts

          of  data.   By  being  able  to  instantly  store   and   retrive

          information these governments can  streamline almost any function

          from police work to lawmaking.  Since the late  1950s people have

          also begun  to  realise  the benefits of storing large amounts of

          data about persons or places in large  data banks.  This idea has

          caused many people to desire the establishment of a National Data

          Bank, an immense data base containing information of all kinds on

          everyone in the country.   However,  although  attempts have been

          made towards this they have never yet attained success because of

          the  many  controversial issues which surround  this  idea.   For

          example, no one can  agree  on  just  what  the  data bank should

          contain, or what it will be used  for.  By examining the progress

          that has been made so far towards the creation of a National Data

          Bank and what remains to be done in the future one can see why it

          might be many years before such a data base is created.


               In several states and local  governments  large  data  bases

          have already been created, an example of this  is Alameda County,

          California.   In  1967  the  local government created  what  they

                                                1
          called a  "People Information System."   This data base contained

          ----------

          1.  Fordon  Milliman,  "Alameda  County's   People   Informaation
          System,"Datamation, March 1967 p.32.



                                        - 1 -










          information of all kinds on the people  of Alameda County and was

          devided  into  two  subsystems.  The  first  subsystem  contained

          information valuable to  police  such as names, aliases, criminal

          records,  etc.  Nowadays, however, almost all police  departments

          have similar data banks.  Alameda also created a second subsystem

          to  their  data  base   which   contained   more  widely  ranging

          information such as political,  health, economic, and educational

          data about the population.


               The  method  by which this data base was created  is  called

          "horizontal"   integration.   "Horizontal"  integration  is   the

          process of combining the records  of  seceral  state  or  federal

                                                     2
          agencies into one data information  center. Not  only  does  this

          make more  data  accessable  to  each  agency,  it  also  reduces

          duplication of data and enables each separate agency to eliminate

          their  need  for data storage.  In a locality like  Alameda  this

          would mean that agencies such as  the  Board  of  Education,  the

          Department of Motor Vehicles, the Police, and the  Department  of

          Welfare would combine all of their records into one  computerized

          data  base.   This integration would therefore  give  the  police

          access to records such as health,  education,  or  a  variety  of

          other areas as it  would  for  any  other  agency.   "Horizontal"

          integration is not usually as easy as it  was  for  Alameda, they

          had  the  advantage  of  a reletively small  amount  of  data  to

          ----------

          2.    James    Martin,The     computerized     Society,(Englewood
          Cliffs,N.J.;Prentice-Hall,1970),p.272



                                        - 2 -










          integrate.


               Another larger  and more complex example of this integration

          occurred  in  Detroit at about the same time.  The  Detroit  data

          base also consisted of two parts, a social-data bank  containinhg

          information  collected  over the previous