Accountable Information Usage in Distributed Information Sharing Environments Project

Whenever using information, whether sharing, storing, or manipulating data, the act should always be compliant with the policies or laws that regulate the conduct. While this is a responsibility with which all are struggling, we hold our government to the highest standards. No matter the crisis - from 9/11 to Hurricane Sandy - or responsibility - from storing our job applications to protecting against fraud in the financial system - we expect
our government to get the job done, within the bounds of their authority
and while still protecting our individual privacy. Our work has contributed to the understanding of and functioning capabilities needed for digital sharing and use of information by the federal government and, beyond, between federal and state agencies, and between government and private sector critical infrastructure. In our earlier phases, we built and demonstrated Accountable Systems, systems capable of self-regulating and/or self-reporting the granular details of adherence to data use policy. Using Accountable Systems, and scenarios based on real government experience, we have demonstrated the ability to fully represent complex policy in computer code, the ability to reason that policy over data usage, infer compliance or non-compliance, and provide detailed justification for the decision. In our later phases, we have expanded operational capability by improving the system's ability to scale, and operational usefulness by creating the ability to produce assistance when there is insufficient information (too many unknowns) to provide a conclusive result. We also have demonstrated the ability to create interoperability of our system with existing governmental systems and the relative speed with which the technology can be brought to wholly new subject domains and situations.