Sadly the Law Enforcement National Data Exchange, to give the software interface its full title, won't be available to civilian internet users, but unconfirmed reports say that N-DEx access will also be available to law enforcement officials at US embassies around the world.
In a press statement, the FBI cites the example of a N-DEx search by Colorado-based law enforcement officials - working on an organised crime case - to identify a 'person of interest'.
Because officials could not find the person concerned through conventional means, they used the N-DEx search engine to discover their their suspect was under investigation in an out-of-state drug case being worked by a federal agency.
A state trooper then contacted the agency to learn that suspect had been named in other drug-related cases in California.
Based on this information, the FBI says that the trooper began reaching out to other federal, state, and local agencies in California and beyond, and soon discovered that his subject was a member of a violent gang headquartered in Los Angeles that, up until then, was not known to be operating in Colorado.
This process of connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated pieces of criminal data housed in different places is the backbone of N-DEx, says the FBI.
"The system enables its law enforcement users to submit certain data to a central repository - located at our Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) in West Virginia - where it's compared against data already on file from local, state, tribal, and federal agencies to identify links and similarities among persons, places, things, and activities across jurisdictional boundaries", adds the FBI.
Although access to N-DEx has been restricted to a highly secure internet service accessible to a limited number of agencies, the FBI says that, later in February this year, it will be available to thousands more law enforcement and criminal justice agencies around the US.
When N-DEx was first developed in 2008, the FBI says that it gave the early agencies a few basic facilities, including the ability to create link analysis charts and to search several thousand incident/case report records and arrest data to help determine a person’s true identity.
The second phase, in 2009, supported 100 million searchable records and added the capability to do full-text and geospatial searches.
It also, says the FBI, enabled users to exchange information with each other and to subscribe to automatic notifications concerning people/cases of interest to them.
"This month's third and final phase will add probation and parole information to the database, as well as enhancements to some of its existing capabilities," says the FBI, adding the system will be able to support searching of more 200 million records.
According to Dan Roberts, the CJIS' assistant director, N-DEx is a powerful investigative tool that will "help keep our communities safer, not only by linking criminal justice data together as never before, but also by enabling investigative partnerships across jurisdictions."