A Colorado consortium contract bars LexisNexis from tying service access to data contribution

A Colorado consortium's master contract bars LexisNexis from making service access conditional on data contribution, and it requires an agency's written consent before any of its records enter the national PSDEX pool.

The language lives in Paragraph 3 (Customer Data) of the Colorado Information Sharing Consortium (CISC) Master Terms, as executed in the Grand County master agreement. CISC is the data-sharing body for roughly 124 Colorado law enforcement agencies, and LexisNexis is its contracted vendor. Under that paragraph, a member can grant, withhold, revoke, or condition its consent at its sole discretion. The actual decision is recorded downstream, in each agency's AVCC (Accurint Virtual Crime Center) Addendum.

That downstream detail are important - and CISC confirmed it for us in writing. When we asked the consortium directly for the technical specifications behind these data feeds, its executive director responded that CISC holds no such records. Every data-sharing agreement, he wrote, is between the individual agency and LexisNexis, not the consortium. The consent decision sits exactly where the contract says it does: at the agency level, in the addendum.

Consent is the whole ballgame because contribution is hard to undo. The license an agency grants LexisNexis over contributed records, Section II.1 of the standard AVCC Addendum, is irrevocable and worldwide. Once records flow into the Public Safety Data Exchange, they become searchable by other subscribing agencies and reachable by federal entities, and the license to that copy survives even if the agency later cancels its subscription. The written-consent gate is the only point in the pipeline where an agency can still say no.

Two things make the CISC clause notable.

First, it is the clearest documented rebuttal we have found to a claim some agencies have made: that AVCC contributions cannot be restricted. They can, and CISC's own contract spells out how.

Second, this protection is not boilerplate. In multiple areas of the agreement, including the Master Services Agreement reviewed by researchers, CISC appears to have negotiated favorable terms that protect the consortium and abide by Colorado regulations. While agencies, including Downers Grove, IL, have stated that data contributions cannot be restricted, CISC's contract says otherwise.

This paragraph shows that each agency and consortium can choose whether they want to share data with thousands of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. LexisNexis is incentivized to encourage agencies to share, since it allows them to turn around and sell access to a larger pool of data. While most agencies are presented with documents that automatically share data nationally, CISC provides an example and negotiating leverage to agencies and city councils who wish to restrict the sharing of local data with thousands of unknown agencies.