Researchers ensure privacy with data mining program

-- As new disclosures mount about government surveillance programs, computer science researchers hope to wade into the fray by enabling data mining that also protects individual privacy.

Largely by employing the head-spinning principles of cryptography, the researchers say they can ensure that law enforcement, intelligence agencies and private companies can sift through huge databases without seeing names and identifying details in the records.

For example, manifests of airplane passengers could be compared with terrorist watch lists - without airline staff or government agents seeing the actual names on the other side's list. Only if a match were made would a computer alert each side to uncloak the record and probe further.

"If it's possible to anonymize data and produce ... the same results as clear text, why not?" John Bliss, a privacy lawyer in IBM Corp.'s "entity analytics" unit, told a recent workshop on the subject at Harvard University.

The concept of encrypting or hiding identifying details in sensitive databases is not new. Exploration has gone on for years, and researchers say some government agencies already deploy such technologies - though protecting classified information rather than individual privacy is a main goal.

Even the data-mining project that perhaps drew more scorn than any other in recent years, the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness research program, funded at least two efforts to anonymize database scans. --