Briefs

Associated Press (07/14/03); Fordahl, Matthew

Privacy and security researcher Teresa Lunt is building the privacy protection device that would supposedly filter out sensitive information from government investigative queries. Her work at the Palo Alto Research Center is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for its Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project. Lunt says much of the debate about TIA is uninformed and that many people mistakenly believe the government is going to pool consumer data in a central database; according to what she knows, Lunt says the TIA system would be a front-end connecting to privately-owned databases of consumer records, and that her privacy appliance would filter out personal details while narrowing in on suspicious individuals. Eventually, investigators would go to a judge for a special court order to identify a limited number of suspect individuals, and Lunt says it should be no more invasive for most people than current marketing schemes.

However, Electronic Privacy Information Center general counsel David Sobel worries that the judicial system is not designed to handle the type of situation presented by TIA. A similar privacy device and government investigative system is set for testing this year that strips personal identifiers from hospital records, allowing bioterrorism experts to quickly confirm possible attacks. Investigators in that scenario, however, are looking for general trends, unlike anti-terrorism investigators that are trying to find the isolated, tell-tale signs of an impending terrorist attack. Proponents of TIA say that only such a system would have been able to uncover the Sept. 11 attacks before they occurred.

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