Policy appliances are technical control and logging mechanisms to enforce or reconcile policy rules (informaton use rules) and to ensure accountability in information systems. [ 1 ]

As is already evident, the emerging global information society will consist of many heterogeneous but interconnected systems that will each be governed or managed according to different policies, rules, or principles that meet local information management needs. (For example, systems may be subject to different international, national or other political subdivision information disclosure or privacy laws; or different information management or security policies among or between government agencies, government and private sector information systems, or producers and consumers of proprietary information or intellectual property, etc.)

This interconnected network of systems (for which the Internet as we currently know it serves as the transport layer) will increasingly require dynamic agreement and technical mediation as to which policies will govern information as it flows between or among systems (that is, what use policies will govern what information goes where, under what constraints, and who has access to it for what purposes, etc.).

Because no single policy can govern all systems or information needs, some method of reconciling differences between systems and then enforcing and monitoring agreed policies will have to be devised in order to share useful information. Current static methods based on all-or-nothing access control are insufficient to meet variable information production and consumption needs, particularly when there are potentially competing policies (for example, the conflict between disclosure and privacy laws) that are contextually dependent. What is needed are dynamic, contextually-aware control mechanisms to enforce use policies.

Although policy development is a political or cultural process, not a technological one, technical systems architecture can bound what policy opportunities exist. Thus, some technical means to reconcile, enforce and monitor use policy across systems will be required. In order to maintain the open transport, end-to-end principles embedded in the current Internet design – that is, to avoid hard-coding policy solutions in the transport layer – policy appliances will be required to mediate between systems to facilitate information sharing, data exchange, and management process interoperability.

Policy appliances will increasingly mediate between data owners or producers, data aggregators, and data users, and among heterogeneous institutional systems or networks, in order to enforce, reconcile, and monitor agreed information management policies and laws across system (or between jurisdictions) with divergent information policies or needs. Policy appliances will interact with smart data (data that carries with it contextual relevant terms for its own use) and intelligent agents (queries that are self-credentialed, authenticating, or contextually adaptive) to control information flows, protect security and confidentiality, and maintain privacy.

Policy appliances will support policy-based information management processes by enabling rules-based processing, selective disclosure, and accountability and oversight.

Policy appliance technologies for rules-based processing include analytic filters, contextual search, semantic programs, labeling and wrapper tools, and DRM, among others; policy appliance technologies for selective disclosure include anonymization, content personalization, subscription and publishing tools, among others; and, policy appliance technologies for accountability and oversight include authentication, authorization, immutable and non-repudiable logging, and audit tools, among others.

Control and accountability over policy appliances will be a key determinant in policy implementation and enforcement, and will be subject to ongoing international and national political, corporate and bureaucratic struggle. Immutable and non-repudiable logs will be necessary to ensure accountability and compliance for both operational and civil liberties policy needs. Increasingly, international and national information policy and law will be reliant on technical means of enforcement and accountability through policy appliances.

References

1. The concept of policy appliances is described in K. A. Taipale, "Designing Technical Systems to Support Policy: Enterprise Architecture, Policy Appliances, and Civil Liberties", Chapter 9.4 in 21st Century Information Technologies and Enabling Policies for Counter-Terrorism (Robert Popp and John Yen, eds., IEEE Press, forthcoming 2005) (See Introduction).

See also, Technology, Security, and Privacy: The Fear of Frankenstein, the Mythology of Privacy, and the Lessons of King Ludd, 7 Yale J. L. & Tech. 123; 9 Intl. J. Comm. L. & Pol'y 8 (2004) at 56-58 (discussing “privacy appliances” to enforce rules and provide accountability). The concept of privacy appliances originated with the DARPA Total Information Awareness project. See Presentation by Dr. John Poindexter, Director, Information Awareness Office (IAO), DARPA, at DARPA-Tech 2002 Conference, Anaheim, CA (Aug. 2, 2002); ISAT 2002 Study, Security with Privacy (Dec. 13, 2002); and IAO Report to Congress regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program at A-13 (May 20, 2003) in response to Consolidated Appropriations Resolution, 2003, No.108-7, Division M, §111(b) [signed Feb. 20, 2003].