Privacy Assurance

A government’s ability to quickly collect, analyze, and share information is often considered vital to its national security. At increasing scale, however, this same information sharing is increasingly viewed in tension with the protection of personal liberties. This paper describes a technical 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. Rather, the box is driven by encoded policy statements that define patterns of reasonable suspicion derived from standard of law, as interpreted by a duly constituted policy body. The box 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, much higher levels of privacy assurance are believed possible.