The LESC, which was established in compliance with a congressional statutory mandate, is designed to respond to inquiries from Federal, State, and local criminal justice agencies regarding aliens under investigation or arrested for commission of an "aggravated felony" or other criminal offenses. "Aggravated felonies" are defined as crimes that involve murder, rape, child pornography, narcotics trafficking, firearms trafficking, nonpolitical crimes of violence, certain felonies, and other specified misdemeanors. The LESC, which is located in Williston, Vermont, operates 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It assists law enforcement agencies with information obtained from eight service databases, the National Crime Information Center, the Interstate Identification Index, and other State criminal history indexes. Direct access to the LESC is available via the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS) message key "IAQ." Only agencies authorized to request criminal record information via NLETS will be granted access to the LESC. The operations staff at the LESC extracts information from the various service indexes and manually prepares individual responses to each inquiry received.