Wow. Stephen O’Grady, from the analyst firm RedMonk is on the Board of Advisors for The Privacy Place and yet is humble enough not to have mentioned his recent paper “SOA Meets Compliance: Compliance Oriented Architecture.” But I happened to stumble across it as I was doing google searches on compliance technology.

The opening teaser in O’Grady’s Paper states is:

Leveraging IT to enhance business processes with transactional transparency is a necessary response to corporate governance scandals. Building the “real time enterprise” is fast becoming the preferred method for reducing fraud, and, in more and more cases, it is a mandated one.

I believe the key phrase here is “transactional transparency” in one deft phrase O’Grady has captured to industry’s trend of melding together IT (“transactional”) and business requirements (“transparency”, as in auditable acxtivity). He goes on to build a case for building transactional transparency into an IT environment using services oriented architecture, yielding what he calls, “Compliance Oriented Architecture.”

While O’Grady focuses on legal compliance issues such as Sarbanes-Oxley, it’s clear to see that a compliance oriented architecture is also key to privacy management issues. This paper is a must read for anyone who cares about Privacy Enhancing Technologies for the enterprise.

–Calvin Powers

The NSF (National Science Foundation) is funding a project, entitled “Surveillance, Analysis and Modeling of Chatroom Communities “.

From the award abstract, it appears as though the researchers intend to develop an automated surveillance system that will collect data in Internet chatrooms to discover hidden groups in which possible terrorist activities might be discussed. The system would automatically determine who is chatting with whom as well as specific topics that are being discussed in chatrooms by specific chat room participants. Unfortunately, the abstract does not mention how the PIs will investigate the social impact of such technologies; nor does it mention how this technology may or may not violate the privacy of innocent chatroom participants.

As researchers it is critical for us to consider the broader impacts of our work on society, especially when creating technologies that can further erode what little remaining privacy public citizens can still claim.