Re: asymmetric snooping

Posted by Marcus G. Daniels on Sep 25, 2013; 12:26pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/asymmetric-snooping-tp7583857p7583882.html

On 9/25/13 12:00 AM, Arlo Barnes wrote:

It seems unacceptable that a statement could stand like "X is 52% classified" where X is not an aggregate disconnected set of things, but some single fact in context.   It would be just muddy guidance.  The fact in context can be disclosed to a specific audience, or it cannot.  It can't be disclosed 52% of the time.

Often, though, there is confusion about what the parameter to be discretized is. For example, you might use 'facts' as the parameter, and say something like "52% of the facts about Project X are disclosed in the press release."

Right.  That's why I qualified it with "aggregate disconnect set of things".   I mean that the hypothetical fact or relation was a primitive not a composite, e.g. "bin Laden believed to be in Abbottabad" (prior to his death).   Another 99 facts, of which, say, 51 of them were, say, about locations of Galeb-4 fighter aircraft in the former Yugoslavia in 1999 prior to NATO bombings (info now available at www.foia.cia.gov, but then secret), and another 48 which were about the popular flavors of ice cream in Oklahoma City.

In the case of one person probing sensitive personal information of another person, the latter might say "I'm not comfortable talking about that" or modify/truncate the details of story on the fly to not reveal their discomfort nor their information.

In a triple store database, a query for relations would return different rows depending on who was asking, and no triples could be added for a lower security level if they were derived from queries made at a more restrictive level.  Probably simply limiting records isn't sufficient -- a triple store front end might also sometimes need to invent proxy information (cover stories) to maintain self-consistency.  

Quantitative information is tricky, since anything that is revealed is a stake in the ground for future queries, e.g. Glen's example of the black budget could be deduced within wide error bars by starting with the country's GDP as an upper bound.  Bit it is absurd to make the GDP a secret.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com