My Testimony Before The DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee

On Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 I testified before the DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee.  The testimony transcripts were recently posted on the DHS web site.

Transcript Here

In my testimony (which starts on the bottom of page 36) I had to pick just a few key points, so I chose to focus on these four things:

1. The use of directory-based information sharing to enable discovery while limiting information leakage (related post No Need to Overshare);
2. The use of anonymization for enhanced privacy protection (related post Advanced Analytics in the Anonymized Data Space);
3. The importance of Immutable Audit Logs which calls for tamper resistant logs (related post IAL’s); and
4. The limited role of data mining to predict terrorist intent (related post on Data Mining, Predicate Triage and NSA Domestic Surveillance).

With respect to this last point, I was also on the record saying “one in a million things happen millions of times a day.”  This speaks to the notion that statistical anomalies are so prevalent they are uninteresting in and of themselves.  To highlight this, imagine on any given day how many people around the world say “what are the odds of that?”