With ‘Brandeis’ Project, Darpa Seeks to Advance Privacy Technology

The Pentagon’s advanced research arm is pursing privacy technology. And this time, it is technology intended to protect individual privacy rather than compromise it. The new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) program is called Brandeis, a nod to the guiding principle of the research initiative. Louis Brandeis, a progressive lawyer who became a Supreme Court justice, was the co-author with Samuel D. Warren of an influential essay, “The Right to Privacy.” Published in Harvard Law Review in 1890, it forcefully made the case that safeguarding privacy was essential to individual freedom.

Darpa will support early stage research in areas like advanced cryptography, a field known as multiparty differential privacy, and machine-learning software that can learn and predict a person’s privacy preferences -- a clever digital assistant for privacy protection. The latter would be a big change from the complex privacy settings on search engines and websites now, which is a major reason much of the online population just accepts the default settings.