Page 44 - Federal Computer Week, July 2019

Mining government data while protecting privacy
A pilot program demonstrates how agencies could improve data analysis without sacrificing individual privacy
BY STEPHANIE KANOWITZ
The personally identifiable informa- tion government agencies hold must be secured against hack- ers, but doing so can also keep other agencies from accessing the informa- tion. Those restrictions make it nearly impossible to cross-reference and pull insights from data housed by different agencies.
Fortunately, a partnership among the Allegheny County, Pa., Depart- ment of Human Services, the Bipar- tisan Policy Center, and technology research and development company Galois has tested two technologies’ ability to analyze data while protect- ing the sensitive information within it. The early results are promising.
The organizations found that they could improve data analysis without sacrificing individual privacy by using a cryptography technique called secure multiparty computation and a trusted execution environment. The partners were also able to provide analysis rap- idly when necessary.
“Policymakers sometimes want answers to questions very quickly, and as we go forward in terms of analyzing confidential data, we have to be able to calibrate the timeliness of information with also the burden that is imposed by the analysis itself,” said Nick Hart, who was director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Evidence Project and is now CEO of the Data Coalition.
“Part of the reason for doing this was to explore whether the...technology could achieve the goals of privacy protection but also data analysis in a meaningful way and could we rea- sonably do it within a public-sector setting.”
‘Computing where all the
data stays encrypted’
The researchers ran tests on millions
of county records from anonymized
datasets based on jail records, medi-
cal examiner records, mental health services, youth and family services, and homelessness. Although data protec- tion was part of the test, the data was anonymized to make it easier for the
44 July 2019 FCW.COM