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Report pitches ideas for government privacy tech

Anne Broache Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Anne Broache
covers Capitol Hill goings-on and technology policy from Washington, D.C.
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Anne Broache
2 min read

Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush Administration and Congress have been highlighting the importance of allowing federal agencies to share information they have collected about potential national security threats.

A new report (click for PDF) issued Thursday by the Markle Foundation's Task Force on National Security in the Information Age targets those efforts, suggesting a detailed list of steps the government should take and technologies it should use to guard privacy and civil liberties.

The report's authors--including representatives from the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Brookings Institution--argue that the government should overhaul its current method of deciding which agencies should be privy to certain data.

Rather than relying on principles such as whether someone is a U.S. person or where data is being collected, the government should adopt an "authorized use" standard that allows data to be shared based solely on how it is going to be used, the report says. Rules for such a standard--along with tamper-resistant tools for logging who accesses information--could be embedded in each agency's software and hardware in order to regulate, on a technological level, who can view and share which categories of data.

For instance, under federal rules, the CIA is allowed to collect financial data to track terrorist financing overseas, but it's not supposed to conduct investigations about money flows within the United States. An "authorized use" computer system could be equipped with ways to ensure that access remains appropriately limited.

The report also suggests employing technology to "anonymize" data--that is, encrypting data so that its contents cannot be read by humans but can still be mined for patterns and correlations by computers.

Such steps and others, they suggest, will boost the public's trust, thus allowing the government to conduct more fruitful investigations of terrorists and other harms.