Protecting the Privacy of Individuals in Terrorist Tracking Applications

摘要

Countering terrorism involves gathering information from a wide diversity of sources to discover key facts and relationships, develop models of hypotheses, and support human reasoning on likely futures and outcomes. Many of these data sources contain sensitive personal information, such as data on telephone calls, email, credit card usage, bank accounts, car rentals, housing, educational data, health-related data, drivers' licenses, airline and hotel reservations, visas, border crossing, attendance at events, and application for government programs. In tracking potential terrorists and attempting to discover their relationships and organization, is it necessary to focus on data about individuals. Yet it is this identification of data with individuals that makes the information sensitive. The goal of this project was to allow authorized analysts to search these data for terrorist-related activity while providing a realistic degree of privacy protection for ordinary citizens who may be also represented in those databases. The proposed solution has the following elements: Inference control to prevent unauthorized individuals from completing queries that would allow identification of ordinary citizens, access control to return sensitive identifying data to appropriately authorized users, Immutable audit logs that ensure all data accesses are recorded immediately and permanently with no possibility of alteration.