Homeland Insecurity: Datamining, Terrorism Detection, and Confidentiality (2004)

Introduction:

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there was heightened attention in the United States on the use of multiple government and private databases for the identification of possible perpetrators of future attacks, part of an unprecedented expansion of federal government datamining activities, many involving databases containing personal information This article reviews some proposals that have surfaced for the search of multiple databases without compromising possible pledges of confidentiality to the individuals whose data are included and their link to the related literature on privacy-preserving datamining. In particular, we focus on the concept of selective revelation and its confidentiality implications.