Multilevel security: privacy by design

Although data mining and database security are common topics of conversation in the computer and information sciences, they do not often inspire furious articles from New York Times columnists and letters of outrage from readers. Yet, in the fall of 2002, high-profile newspapers began to run stories on the potential threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by Total Information Awareness (TIA). Total Information Awareness was a program created within the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in February 2002. Total Information Awareness sought to develop and use technologies such as data mining and biometrics in order to monitor private communications and commercial transactions, process large amounts of data from different sources, and to look for patterns of behavior that might reveal terrorist activity [1].