NIce article on Balancing Data Needs And Privacy - how US folk can preserve privacy in response to the Total Information Awareness programme. It appears there has been some substantial investment by the Pentagon into research at PARC to produce sound privacy enhancing technologies, that strip away personally identifying information, whilst allowing aggregate analysis of data in sophisticated ways which further the objectives of law enforcement and security services to fight crime and protect against other attacks. DARPA have put up £3.5 million dollars for this research, which is a bit more than peanuts. Marc Rottenberg of EPIC is skeptical "You can't escape the fundamental contradiction of privacy research being conducted around a half-a-billion-dollar program of national surveillance. It is like building environmentally friendly nuclear power plants."

The cynic in me agrees with him. The reality is that mass privacy invasion is unlikely to be counteracted in the short term effectively by law, however. So what we probably need is an architectural/technological response/development of the type that Teresa Lunt appears to be considering here. Private enterprises and individuals then can use these kinds of technolgies as technological gatekeepers to maintain the integrity of access, with various levels of access being granted e.g to law enforcement authorities who provide appropriately secured warrants or other legal documents.