Word: interpolates
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...through financial necessity and intense discussions with officials across the world, Noble has developed in just four years an ever-expanding array of databases that are among the world's most efficient policing tools. That is a dizzying contrast to the methods of the 1990s, when Interpol's "red notices" - its alerts for wanted fugitives - were sent by regular mail, arriving in some police stations and border posts weeks later. To be sure, there were some famous red-notice successes, including the capture of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal) in 1994 and the American...
...Despite that global scope, Interpol's headquarters - with its sky-lit atrium, potted plants and sweeping views of the Rhône River - still has the air of a mid-sized company rather than a law-enforcement organization. Most of the few hundred people in the building are on first-name terms. The organization squeezes by on a budget of about $65 million a year from member countries' donations - approximately the same amount that the New York Police Department spends in an average week. Interpol's staff in Lyons joke bitterly that the organization costs little more than David Beckham...
...Noble, the meager funding is not just a practical limitation, but a distressing sign of how Western governments undervalue Interpol. "Neither the U.S. nor any other country realizes that this is a billion-dollar-a-year problem, not a $50-million-a-year problem," he says. "They don't understand that Interpol is cost-effective." Noble spends weeks every year at police conferences and government hearings, pressing the point that Interpol's worldwide reach makes it uniquely positioned to collate data on everything from stolen motor-vehicle licenses and lost passports to fingerprints and DNA samples. Yet there is still...
...much better now. Six years after Interpol began collecting stolen document details, its list contains about 8 million passports and 6 million identity documents - the only such international database in the world. Aside from J.F.K. Airport, Miami and Los Angeles airports have begun to make routine checks of passports against Interpol's list while passengers are still in the air. And the system will roll out at U.S. ports within the next few months, says Interpol's Washington director, Martin Renkiewicz. "We process between 10,000 and 12,000 messages monthly from various officers seeking assistance on investigative matters," says...
...power of this enormous cache of personal data is evident from some of Interpol's recent actions. In January last year, 11 people presented their Cypriot passports at Monterrey airport in Mexico. The numbers that flashed up on Interpol's database revealed that these documents came from a batch of 850 blank passports stolen in Cyprus; it turned out that the men were Iraqi citizens trying to slip into the U.S. Last April, masked gunmen executed a jewelry heist in Dubai. They left behind DNA samples, which matched those that Interpol had in its database for two Serbian armed robbers...