At 03:36 AM 1/31/2006, Eugen Leitl cross-posted:

From: http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech-Software/wtr_16209,300,p1.html

Monday, January 30, 2006 Blindfolding Big Brother, Sort of

Jeff Jonas is an IBM engineer who specializes in software that infuses powerful search technology with anonymity.

JJ: The technique that we have created allows the bank to anonymize its customer data. When I say "anonymize," I mean it changes the name and address and date of birth, or whatever data they have about an identity, into a numeric value that is nonhuman readable and nonreversible. You can't run the math backwards and compute from the anonymized value what the original input value was.

Do you think its creating a hash of normalized data base entries? Oppsss... it is.

TR: And this is obviously useful for counterterrorism.

JJ: Here's the scenario: The government has a list of people we should never let into the country. It's a secret. They don't want people in other countries to know. And the government tends to not share this list with corporate America. Now, if you have a cruise line, you want to make sure you don't have people getting on your boat who shouldn't even be in the United States in the first place. Prior to the U.S. Patriot Act, the government couldn't go and subpoena 100,000 records every day from every company.

Nah, that's not how its done at all... the U.S. government gets someone (even the cruiseline, which after all is a regulated carrier) to place a back-door in their software so it can be remotely accessed just like the NSA sits on top of peering-pint routers and has a duplicate data stream quitely created so it can sift through passenger logs without asking. Rememeber the bruhaha over the KLM flight that was denied entry into U.S. air space last year when the DHS reported that the flight had two people aboard on their watch list? Now I just wonder who they knew that..... Imagine the possible impact to this clandestine monitoring when people start using the recent 'Gilmore' ruling and traveling (at least domestically) without presenting identify papers. Steve