Technology for Privacy Assurance

A government’s ability to quickly collect, analyze, and share information is often considered vital to its national security and public safety. At increasing scale, however, this same information sharing is increasingly placed in tension with the protection of one’s personal liberties. This chapter describes a method for relieving this tension, offering an approach that enables both to be pursued simultaneously. The approach is founded on the concept of an impenetrable “Black Box” in which information can be placed within, but no person can ever access. The operation of this box is defined by encoded policy statements that specify patterns of reasonable suspicion and/or public safety concern. These statements are derived from standard of law and governance guidelines, as interpreted by a duly constituted policy body. The technological approach is specifically designed to only output detection of authorized patterns, but without ever revealing or enabling any sort of access to the information it contains. With no human involvement in the analytic process, substantially higher levels of privacy assurance are believed possible.