Privacy and Consequences: Legal and Policy Structures for Implementing New Counter-Terrorism Technologies and Protecting Civil Liberty
31 Pages Posted: 5 Aug 2005
Date Written: July 2005
Abstract
New 21st century technologies (ranging from data-mining, to link analysis and data-integration, to biometrics, to new encryption techniques) have much to offer in achieving the compelling national goal of preventing terrorism. This paper asks a practical, concrete question: Can the new technologies be developed, deployed, implemented, and operated in a manner that allows them to be used as an effective anti-terrorism tool while ensuring that there is minimal risk that use of the tool-set will infringe upon American civil liberties?
Practical answers to the problem of oversight can, and must, be crafted. This paper is an effort to sketch out precisely what those safeguards ought to be and how they might impact the most prominent proposed new technologies. Privacy values of the anonymity form have previously been protected by technological inefficiency. With the demise of that protection, a new mechanism of controlling the consequences that arise from scrutiny must be substituted. Broadly speaking those mechanisms should minimize intrusiveness; provide for automated audit and oversight and accountability; and embed within the system architecture policy rules for imposing adverse consequences on individuals.
Keywords: privacy, technology, civil liberties, terrorism, database, dataveillance, information sharing
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation