The average, technologically connected American worker produces some 5,000 megabytes of digital data a day, enough to fill nine CD-ROMs. Only a small fraction of it is stored permanently or is clearly related to a specific identity, but the sheer volume of digital exhaust that is daily life has turned privacy into an endangered entity–and a growing national security concern.
On Wednesday, the military’s Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, or DARPA, put out an agency announcement on a program that seeks to restore some semblance of privacy to the online world. The so-called Brandeis program, named after the late U.S. Supreme Court associate justice and privacy advocate Louis Brandeis, seeks to build “information systems that can ensure private data can only be used for its intended purpose and no other.”
