Tracking Terrorists The Las Vegas Way... With Anonymity
from the a-step-forward dept
Two years ago, we wrote about the sudden interest the government had taken in a program used by Las Vegas casinos to keep out unsavory characters, by analyzing everyone they were connected with. While reports about government use of that software raised a lot of privacy concerns, the company is now trying to relieve some of those concerns by trying to make the system protect people's privacy. The idea is to basically encrypt all the information the system looks through so that it's not identifiable directly. It can then still make its matches, and if enough alarm bells ring, it can tell the researcher which databases to access to get the actual records. As some skeptics in the article point out, the system is far from perfect - but it certainly sounds at least one step better than what they were using previously.
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