In Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists, the National Research Council sets out a framework for the evaluation of classified and unclassified information-based programs that involve the collection and mining of personal data: practices that raise difficult questions about privacy and civil liberties as well as cost, efficacy, legality and societal values.


In this context, the report points to two serious terrorist threats. The first of these is from terrorist acts themselves, while the second arises from a potentially inappropriate or disproportionate response to the threat. In responding to these threats, the report suggests that


  • the threat does not justify government authorities resorting to activities or operations that contravene existing laws;

  • challenges to public safety and national security do not warrant fundamental changes in the level of privacy protection given non-terrorists;

  • exploitation of science and technology is an important component of counterterrorism efforts, and

  • counterterrorist programs should be formulated to provide secondary benefits, useful in other domains, to the nation as a whole.


The report arrives at the following conclusions regarding privacy:


  1. In the counterterrorism effort, some degree of privacy protection can be obtained through the use of a mix of technical and procedural mechanisms;

  2. Data quality is a major issue in the protection of the privacy of non-terrorists;

  3. Inferences about intent and/or state of mind implicate privacy issues to a much greater degree than do assessments or determinations of capability;

  4. Program deployment and use must be based on criteria more demanding than "it's better than doing nothing;"

  5. The current policy regime does not adequately address violations of privacy that arise from information-based programs using advanced analytical techniques, such as state-of-the-art data mining and record linkage;

  6. Because data mining has proven to be valuable in private-sector applications such as fraud detection, there is reason to explore its potential uses in countering terrorism. However, the problem of detecting and preempting a terrorist attack is vastly more difficult than problems addressed by such commercial applications;

  7. The utility of pattern-based data mining is found primarily if not exclusively in its role in helping humans make better decisions about how to deploy scarce investigative resources, and action (such as arrest, search, denial of rights) should never be taken solely on the basis of a data mining result. Automated terrorist identification through data mining (or any other known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts;

  8. Although systems that support analysts in the identification of terrorists can be designed with features and functionality that enhance privacy protection without significant loss to their primary mission, privacy-preserving examination of individually identifiable records is fundamentally a contradiction in terms;

  9. Research and development on data mining techniques using real population are inherently invasive of privacy to some extent;

  10. Behavioral and physiological monitoring techniques might be able to play an important role in counterterrorism efforts when used to detect (a) anomalous states (individuals whose behavior and physiological states deviate from norms for a particular situation) and (b) patterns of activity with well-established links to underlying psychological states;

  11. Further research is warranted for the laboratory development and refinement of methods for automated, remote and rapid assessment of behavioral and physiological states that are anomalous for particular situations and for those that have well-established links to psychological states relevant to terrorist intent;

  12. Technologies and techniques for behavioral observation have enormous potential for violating the reasonable expectations of privacy of individuals;

  13. Census and survey data collected by the federal statistical agencies are not useful for terrorism prevention: such data have little or no content that would be useful for counterterrorism. The content and sampling fractions of household surveys as well as the lack of personal identifiers makes it highly unlikely that these data sets could be linked with any reasonable degree of precision to other databases of use in terrorism prevention.


In light of the above conclusions, the report makes the following recommendations:


  1. U.S. government agencies should be required to follow a systematic process to evaluate the effectiveness, lawfulness and consistency with U.S. values of every information-based program, whether classified or unclassified, for detecting and countering terrorists before it can be deployed and periodically thereafter. The proposed framework in the book offers one such process;

  2. Periodically, after a program has been operationally deployed, and in particular before a program enters a new phase in its life cycle, a framework should be applied before continuing operations or proceeding to the next phase;

  3. To protect privacy of innocent people, the research and development of any information-based counterterrorism program should be conducted with synthetic population data. If a program meets the criteria for deployment, it should be carefully phased, field-tested, and evaluated before general use, and all data about individuals should be rigorously subjected to the full safeguards of the framework;

  4. Any information-based counterterrorism program of the U.S. government should be subjected to robust, independent oversight of program operations, including a practice of using the same data mining technologies to "mine the miners and track the trackers;"

  5. Counterterrorism programs should provide meaningful redress to any individuals inappropriately harmed by their operation;

  6. The U.S. government should periodically review the nation's laws, policies and procedures that protect individuals' private information for relevance and effectiveness in light of changing technologies and circumstances. In particular, the U.S. Congress should reexamine existing law to consider how privacy should be protected in the context of information-based programs (e.g. data mining) for counterterrorism.


The book provides numerous details regarding the nature of the terrorist threat, the social and organizational context and the need for a rational assessment process with numerous hypothetical and illustrative examples and using the suggested framework in a range of different scenarios. Additional appendices provide survey and other relevant data.


Since this book was published in 2008, the Internet Policy Task Force has released a Green Paper that calls for private-sector privacy experts and commercial organizations to play a large role in a new privacy framework. The IAPP membership has a great opportunity to participate in this ongoing evolution.


Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists
is available from the National Research Council of the National Academies Press, www.nap.edu, and from National Academies Press, 500 Fifth Street, N.W., Lockbox 285, Washington, DC, 20055.

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