GUARD: General Utility for Assessing Risk of Disclosure

ABSTRACT: Information is a national asset that must be protected. To make effective use of this asset, information sharing is critical between government agencies, with foreign government partners, and with the private sector. At the same time, in practice, balancing information sharing and information protection can be difficult. Tools are needed to address many challenges, including managing multiple, diverse criteria for sensitivity, assessing the sensitivity of information in context, and efficiently processing big data. GUARD (General Utility for Assessing Risk of Disclosure) is an integrated package of components that automatically assess disclosure risk. It combines a state-of-the-art probabilistic framework for risk assessment with advanced capabilities for unstructured information processing that leverage both document content and contextual and background information. GUARD"s disclosure risk assessment capability will facilitate the core tasks in information sharing, including classifying the sensitivity of information objects and deciding whether to share that information. BENEFIT: GUARD is designed to address the greatest challenges in information sharing. GUARD"s principal benefit is in enhancing human understanding of the complex information landscape, informing human judgment in sharing and safeguarding decisions. GUARD facilitates the rapid adjudication of documents at a large scale, reducing the need for manual review. GUARD reasons over the available data and over the knowledge of adversaries, tying together information beyond the capacity of human judges. It adapts notions of sensitivity for different domains, making it easily applicable to many information scenarios. GUARD"s flexible disclosure framework broadly applies to informing sharing in many applications, including enterprise data management and health record technology.