Following the events of September 11, 2001, there has been heightened attention in the United States and elsewhere to the use of multiple government and private databases for the identification of possible perpetrators of future attacks, as well as an unprecedented expansion of federal government data mining activities, many involving databases containing personal information. There have also been claims that prospective datamining could be used to find the “signature” of terrorist cells embedded in larger networks. We present an overview of why the public has concerns about such activities and describe some proposals for the search of multiple databases which supposedly do not compromise possible pledges of confidentiality to the individuals whose data are included. We also explore their link to the related literatures on privacy-preserving data mining. In particular, we focus on the matching problem across databases and the concept of “selective revelation” and their confidentiality implications.
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Fienberg, S.E. (2008). Homeland Insecurity. In: Chen, H., Reid, E., Sinai, J., Silke, A., Ganor, B. (eds) Terrorism Informatics. Integrated Series In Information Systems, vol 18. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71613-8_10
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