Identity Resolution Daily

By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

Identity resolution is a vital technology for law enforcement fusion centers, and we’ve often followed developments with links to stories in this area. When overlapping and adjacent jurisdictions share data with each other, uncovering hidden identities and linkages greatly accelerates the detection of criminal activity.

This map shows current and planned deployments of state and local fusion centers. Mention “fusion center” and you’re likely to get one of two divergent reactions:

1. “Great idea – law enforcement agencies not combining forces and sharing data with each other to catch criminals wastes energy and taxpayer dollars.”
2. “This sounds like another step toward Big Brother government snooping around looking for some reason to harass private citizens.”

On the “great idea” side, we’ve seen editorial and popular support for fusion centers in Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee, and other states. Strong federal support for state-based centers is also evident in recent announcements from the Department of Homeland Security. On the “Big Brother” side of the discussion, projects having ominous overtones like the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative have drawn attention and suspicion from privacy rights groups like the ACLU.

Take a case in point. In Austin TX the formation of an Austin Regional Intelligence Center was recently proposed. On the one hand, local law enforcement leaders are enthusiastic about the ability to “stitch together information collected by various agencies to create new files on suspects in criminal cases or on suspects they think may be planning to carry out crimes and merit further surveillance.”

On the other hand, privacy advocates express concern about the use of unchecked power and the establishment of clear policies for how private citizens will be protected from intrusive surveillance. “If you start to go above and beyond the lawful means of data information collection, we are well on our way down a slippery slope where there is no return,” said Chuck Young, founder and treasurer of the civil liberties group Texans for Accountable Government.

The City of Austin police have been diligent in addressing privacy concerns very directly. David Carter, the assistant police chief responsible for the project, said that “we do recognize that there are concerns in some people’s minds concerning fusion centers in general,” and the department has taken care to meet early with representatives of the ACLU and other concerned citizens to determine how best to achieve security objectives while protecting the privacy of individuals.

We believe a forum like IdentityResolutionDaily allows everyone to share views and information on this long-standing and complex issue and is the best way to enable open communication among all concerned parties. Let us hear from you.

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[Post from Infoglide] Entity Resolution Metrics

“In the last post we looked at the problem of measuring the accuracy of entity resolution processes.  As with any accuracy measure, comparing to a known standard of correctness or benchmark is required.  However, even without a benchmark, other measures are also important in evaluating ER outcomes.”

SmartData Collective: MDM: Build or Buy?

“In the paper, I describe five core MDM functions that should drive a deliberate MDM strategy:

1. Data cleansing and correction
2. Metadata
3. Security and access services
4. Data migration
5. Identity resolution”

New York Times: The Rules on Names Could Bend a Little

“Given more precise information at booking, the T.S.A. expects to be able to match more precisely a passenger’s identity against those on the watch list. This should reduce the number of false positives — people who are flagged at security until it can be determined that they are not the person with a similar name who is on a watch list. ‘The Secure Flight watch-list matching process occurs before a passenger even gets to the airport,’ Mr. Leyh said. ‘So if you get a boarding pass, the Secure Flight watch-list matching process is done.’ In other words, you are clear once you get that pass.”

O’Reilly radar: Health gets personal in the cloud

“A Personal Health Record (PHR) is one way that patients can have some control of their own health data, while providing an interoperable platform for sharing relevant clinical data between providers. Healthcare is changing rapidly and there are some important trends worth watching. Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century.”

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By the Infoglide Team

Come by and see us at TDWI World in Orlando Nov. 3 & 4, Booth 405

The Emculturated World: Unmanage Master Data Management

“MDM breaks down in the moment it becomes divorced from a practical, immediate attempt to capture just what is needed today. The moment it attempts to “bank” standard symbols ahead of their usage, the MDM process becomes speculative, and proscriptive.”

Governing: Can I Say No to an Electronic Health Record?

“In some instances, patients don’t even know their information is being shared. For example, if consumers turn over prescription drug records when applying for life insurance, the insurer will sometimes hand off the information to business partners who then hand it off to data miners. To keep a tighter grip on privacy, Deven McGraw, director of health privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, would like a set of rules that all organizations in the health IT world would have to follow.”

Related post: “Applying Identity Resolution to Patient Identification Integrity”

San Antonio Express-News: McManus recalls 9-11 at GEOINT summit

“Bart Johnson, acting undersecretary for intelligence and analysis with the Homeland Security Department, said cooperation is improving, although problems remain with security clearances and interdepartmental connectivity. ‘The federal government can only do so much in getting it down to the street level,’ Johnson said. Homeland security and Justice Department officials have formed 72 “fusion centers” — terrorism prevention and response centers where federal agencies work with the military, local law enforcement and private partners. Three are in Texas: Austin, Dallas and Collin County near Dallas.”

information management: From Search to Explore

“It’s no surprise that people are looking at more and more internal and external resources for informed decision-making. In the internal case, data integration is a foundation of master data management as well. But integration for BI to common visual tools is increasingly taking place in subsystems, relational databases and cubes, and the visualization layer itself.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Measuring Entity Resolution Accuracy

“In the last post we looked at the problem of comparing two entity resolution (ER) outcomes.  If S represents a list of entity references, then the effect of applying an ER process is to divide S into subsets where each subset comprises all of the references to the same entity.”

Cloud Avenue: Gartner Says Cloud Computing Is The Top Technology Trend In 2010

“Compared to the beginning of 2009, the cloud computing landscape now is very different with a huge potential to change the face of IT forever.”

iHealthBeat: Blumenthal: Officials Working To Boost EHR Connectivity, Security

“Blumenthal also addressed concerns about whether EHR systems would compromise the privacy and security of personal health data. He said regulations are in place to ensure that any health data used for research purposes are stripped of all individually identifiable information.”

Informatica Blog: Data Sharing and Privacy - Eternally Opposed?

“Nevertheless, the risks to privacy from data breaches and concerns about government access to vast stores of private citizen information continue to be recurring themes in today’s security environment. But do the benefits of complete and actionable data always conflict with the desire to secure and maintain privacy?”

Workers’ Comp Insider: Fraud is on the rise

“Steve Tuckey is currently writing an in-depth series on fraud for Risk and Insurance. The first installment, Transparency of Evidence, deals with fraud by doctors, hospitals and other healthcare professionals. He notes that ‘grayer areas of so-called abuse or overutilization continue to vex payers, insurance companies and lawmakers eager to maintain the financial stability and integrity of the system that has protected workers for nearly a century.’”

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[Post from Infoglide] Avoiding False Positives: Analytics or Humans?

“The European Union recently started a five-year research program in conjunction with its expanding role in fighting crime and terrorism. The purpose of Project Indect is to develop advanced analytics that help monitor human activity for ‘automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour and violence.’ Naturally, the project has drawn suspicion and criticism, both from those who oppose the growing power of the EU and from watchdog groups concerned about encroachments into privacy and civil liberty…”

SDTimes: Old thinking does a disservice to new data hubs

“The enterprise needs to be able to understand the origin, the time and possibly the reason for a change. These audit needs must be supported by the data hub at the attribute level. MDM solutions that maintain the golden record dynamically address this need by supporting the history of changes in the source systems record content.”

Accision Health Blog: Surveys Show Importance of EHR

“A new Rand study is one of the first to link the use of electronic health records in community-based medical practices with higher quality of care.  Rand Corporation researchers found in a study of 305 groups of primary care physicians that the routine use of multifunctional EHRs was more likely to be linked to higher quality care than other common strategies, such as structural changes used for improving care.”

NYSIF: Central NY Contractor Hit with Workers Comp Fraud Charges

“Investigators said Mr. Decker previously had an insurance policy with NYSIF when he operated RD Builders in November 2005, a policy cancelled for non-payment a few months later. In 2008, he applied to NYSIF’s Syracuse office for workers’ compensation insurance doing business as Bull Rock Development, Inc.”

public intelligence: Office of Intelligence and Analysis (DHS)

“These entities are unified under local fusion centers, which provide state and local officials with intelligence products while simultaneously gathering information for federal sources.  As of July 2009, there were 72 designated fusion centers around the country with 36 field representatives deployed. The Department has provided more than $254 million from FY 2004-2007 to state and local governments to support the centers.”

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By Robert Barker, Infoglide Senior VP & Chief Marketing Officer

The European Union recently started a five-year research program in conjunction with its expanding role in fighting crime and terrorism. The purpose of Project Indect is to develop advanced analytics that help monitor human activity for “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour and violence.”

Naturally, the project has drawn suspicion and criticism, both from those who oppose the growing power of the EU and from watchdog groups concerned about encroachments into privacy and civil liberty:

According to the Open Europe think tank, the increased emphasis on co-operation and sharing intelligence means that European police forces are likely to gain access to sensitive information held by UK police, including the British DNA database. It also expects the number of UK citizens extradited under the controversial European Arrest Warrant to triple. Stephen Booth, an Open Europe analyst who has helped compile a dossier on the European justice agenda, said these developments and projects such as Indect sounded “Orwellian” and raised serious questions about individual liberty.

Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, a UK human rights group, said, “Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. It’s dangerous enough at [the] national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling.”

At IdentityResolutionDaily, we’ve consistently supported open and civil discussion about balancing security requirements with individual rights of privacy and liberty (e.g. “Walking the Privacy/Security Tightrope“) . We’ve also dealt with the criticality of using analytic technology that minimizes false positives (e.g. “False Positives versus Citizen Profiles“).

Not long ago, James Taylor of Decision Management Solutions made an excellent point about whether using analytic technologies (e.g. identity resolution) versus relying totally on human judgment increases or decreases the risk of false positives:

Humans, unlike analytics, are prone to prejudices and personal biases. They judge people too much by how they look (stopping the Indian with a beard for instance) and not enough by behavior (stopping the white guy who is nervously fiddling with his shoes say)… If we bring analytics to bear on a problem the question should be does it eliminate more biases and bad decision making than it creates new false positives… Over and over again studies show analytics do better in this regard… I think analytics are ethically neutral and the risk of something going “to the dark side” is the risk that comes from the people involved, with or without analytics.

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

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By Gary Seeger, Infoglide Vice President

An intriguing post by Nate Anderson on Ars Technica highlights a difficult reality about today’s easy availability of vast quantities of “anonymized” data. Quoting from a recent paper by Paul Ohm at the University of Colorado Law School, Anderson writes that “as Ohm notes, this illustrates a central reality of data collection: ‘data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.’”

A seminal study published in 2000 by Latanya Sweeney at Carnegie Mellon opened the issue by proving that a simple combination of a very small number of publicly available attributes can uniquely identify individuals:

“It was found that 87% (216 million of 248 million) of the population in the United States had reported characteristics that likely made them unique based only on {5-digit ZIP, gender, date of birth}. About half of the U.S. population (132 million of 248 million or 53%) are likely to be uniquely identified by only {place, gender, date of birth}, where place is basically the city, town, or municipality in which the person resides… In general, few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person.”

Faced with a choice between exploiting easily obtainable data for righteous ends versus the potential misuse of identifying individuals, can an appropriate balance be struck by privacy legislation? Anderson points out that:

“Because most data privacy laws focus on restricting personally identifiable information (PII), most data privacy laws need to be rethought. And there won’t be any magic bullet; the measures that are taken will increase privacy or reduce the utility of data, but there will be no way to guarantee maximal usefulness and maximal privacy at the same time.”

Looking at the subject from a business perspective, using technologies such as identity resolution to connect non-obvious data relationships serves many initiatives. It would seem admirable to exploit public records and other forms of publicly available information to mitigate risks, uncover fraud, or track down “bad” guys. Yet some cry foul when the technology exposes individuals who didn’t anticipate that their “private” information would be used to identify and/or track them down.

In the rapidly evolving cyber-information age, the desires, conflicts, and limitations of protecting privacy will continue to be sorted out in the legal realm. Those of us who solve business issues using identity resolution technology will swim in this legal quagmire for many years. Finding an appropriate balance between the protection of individual privacy and bona fide business uses of “public” data will almost certainly be a growing challenge to the moral and legal minds of our community.

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By the Infoglide Team

todaysthv.com: Arkansas Business on Today’s THV: Arkansas Lottery

“The efforts start at the lottery’s west little rock distribution center, home to 26 million lottery tickets potentially worth about $48 million in winnings. But those tickets are worthless until they pass through multiple security scans. The system ensures that no one can redeem a winning ticket if it was taken from a hijacked delivery truck, or a smash-and-grab at a convenience store that sells the tickets.”

Telegraph.co.uk: EU funding ‘Orwellian’ artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for ‘abnormal behaviour’

“York University’s computer science department website details how its task is to develop ‘computational linguistic techniques for information gathering and learning from the web”…’Our focus is on novel techniques for word sense induction, entity resolution, relationship mining, social network analysis [and] sentiment analysis,’ it says.”

Information Management: Risk Management and the Need for Master Data Management

“By reconciling disparate master data (clients, products, vendors, chart-of-accounts, reference data) across the enterprise, MDM can provide organizations with a comprehensive and accurate view of their businesses, helping them understand their risk exposure to clients and vendors and their overall financial health.”

Government Computer News: Fusion center approach could be effective in other areas

“Closely related cousins to fusion centers are emergency operations centers. Although these centers might also deal with security-related data feeds, their main function is to import real-time data that’s related to specific events such as national disasters or terrorist incidents. An emergency operations center may track everything from the location of ambulances or rescue personnel to available hospital beds or even the location of victims who need to be rescued.”

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[Post from Infoglide] Social CRM, CDI, and Identity Resolution

“In her well-read book on CDI, Jill Dyché offers a definition of CDI that also seems to describe social CRM. Try reading her definition of CDI, replacing ‘CDI’ with ’social CRM’: CDI is a set of procedures, controls, skills and automation that standardize and integrate customer data originating from multiple sources.”

Concord Monitor: Don’t play games when giving your name

“What do they want? Your date of birth, your gender and your middle initial. This information will be relayed to the TSA, and the TSA will match the information against information maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center (an arm of the FBI that gathers and consolidates watch lists). The theory is that a 12-year-old boy named John X. Doe can more easily be separated from John Z. Doe, who happens to be a 37-year-old man with a history of making bombs, if additional information is collected during the booking process. Once TSA has cleared you, you’ll be issued a boarding pass.”

pressdemocrat.com: Achieving paperless health care

“Medical record-keeping, until recently, relied on rooms full of paper files that were easily misplaced and filled with hurried, handwritten entries that could be hard to read. Electronic records hold orderly, keyboard-entered data that never leaves a hard drive and have the potential to move seamlessly from a primary care provider’s office to an emergency room or specialist’s suite.”

ebizQ: MDM Becoming More Critical in Light of Cloud Computing

[David Linthicum] “We’re moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems.   Typically, we’re moving in these new directions without regard for an underlying strategy around MDM, or other data management issues for that matter.”

Homeland Security: I&A Reconceived: Defining a Homeland Security Intelligence Role

“There are currently 72 fusion centers up and running around the country (a substantial increase from 38 centers in 2006).  I&A has deployed 39 intelligence officers to fusion centers nationwide, with another five in pre-deployment training and nearly 20 in various stages of administrative processing.  I&A will deploy a total of 70 officers by the end of FY 2010, and will complete installation of the Homeland Secure Data Network (HSDN), which allows the federal government to share Secret-level intelligence and information with state and local partners, at all 72 fusion centers.”

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By the Infoglide Team

[Post from Infoglide] Social CRM, CDI, and Identity Resolution

“In her well-read book on CDI, Jill Dyché offers a definition of CDI that also seems to describe social CRM. Try reading her definition of CDI, replacing ‘CDI’ with ’social CRM’:  CDI is a set of procedures, controls, skills and automation that standardize and integrate customer data originating from multiple sources(1).”

Charleston Daily Mail: Former owner of WVa trucking company sentenced

“Leonard Cline formerly owned H & H Trucking. The insurance commissioner says he defrauded the old state workers’ compensation system of more than $500,000 in unpaid premiums, penalties and claims for benefits over about 10 years.”

WTVQ: Eight People Indicted for Insurance Fraud

“The US attorney’s office says the suspects intentionally damaged insured automobiles owned by other conspirators then filed claims.”

KansasCity.com: Push for electronic medical records picks up steam

“With or without health care reform this year, electronic medical records are picking up steam. Recent technological advances are easing the transition for doctors and hospitals, and there’s the little matter of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. The act, part of last spring’s stimulus package, included billions of dollars to ‘advance the use of health information technology.’ There’s plenty of advancing to do, with one group estimating that less than half the hospitals and only one in five physicians are equipped to fully use electronic records. ‘The United States is far more advanced in grocery store technology than in medical records technology,’ said Steve Lieber, president and chief executive officer of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in Chicago.”

pnj.com: Man charged with workers’ comp fraud

“Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink announced the arrest today in a news release. In the release, Sink said her Division of Insurance Fraud said Soto is charged with falsifying employment numbers with the intent of avoiding higher workers’ compensation premium payments.”

Federal News Radio: Update: Identity management in the Obama administration

“The alphabet soup of identity management programs from the Bush administration — HSPD-12, TWIC, Real ID, and many more — have gotten little attention publicly during the first nine months of the Obama presidency. But that doesn’t mean identity management has been ignored totally, says one senior administration official.”

London Evening Standard: Lloyd’s chief warns of more insurance fraud

“Lloyd’s of London’s chief executive Richard Ward today warned the deep recession would increase the number of fraudulent claims being made against the insurance market.”

Computerworld: Laptop searches at airports infrequent, DHS privacy report says

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s annual privacy report card revealed more details on the agency’s  controversial policy involving searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders. . . . For instance, numbers released in the report indicate that warrantless searches of electronic devices at U.S. borders are occurring less frequently than some privacy and civil rights advocates might have feared. Of the more than 144 million travelers that arrived at U.S. ports of entry between Oct. 1, 2008 and May 5, 2009, searches of electronic media were conducted on 1,947 of them, the DHS said.Of this number, 696 searches were performed on laptop computers, the DHS said. Even here, not all of the laptops received an ‘in-depth’ search of the device, the report states. A search sometimes may have been as simple as turning on a device to ensure that it was what it purported to be. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents conducted ‘in-depth’ searches on 40 laptops, but the report did not describe what an in-depth search entailed. . . . The report chronicled similar efforts to monitor the privacy implications of a range of projects that privacy groups are also watching. Examples include  Einstein 2.0 network monitoring technology that improves the ability of federal agencies to detect and respond to threats, and the  Real ID identity credentialing program. The DHS’s terror watch list program, its numerous  data mining projects  and the secure flight initiative were also mentioned in the report.”

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