Sensitive Compartmented Knowledge

What it is and how it can and should be managed.

By Roy D. Follendore III

Imagine for a moment a single organizational multiplier that would not only virtually eliminate information overload, it could also improve the existing performance of organizations by an order of magnitude. Imagine this being accomplished through a system of knowledge that does not involve linking content in the conventional sense but rather securely reaching out to arrays of knowledge servers across organizational boundaries and explicitly filtering and aggregating uniquely tailored and detailed presentations for display.

Organizations, be they corporations or Governmental Agencies, are involved in a daily life and death struggle to acquire and apply knowledge. Enormous efforts take place to get leaders the best knowledge available. But the concept of what is to be considered the "best knowledge" does not necessarily mean the most accurate, the most secure, the most timely, the most detailed data. Best knowledge far more often than not, means that an appropriate matrix of data and information that can, should and may be disseminated, arrives and is disseminated, where it is then presented correctly at some appropriate moment (or range of time) to the intended individual, people or system. The level of communication and intent are directly interrelated.

The management of communication control is just as much, and often more, for the benefit of the receiver as the sender. Information overload is therefore something to be seriously concerned with because it threatens communication. Moreover, under communicating (or under reporting) can also threaten communication because it easily leads the receiver to false conclusions. In many ways the control of sensitive knowledge is a literally magical because perspective is so much involved.

Consider the very different perspectives of an audience and a performing stage magician. The knowledge of the performance that is kept private is for the benefit of the audience. The presentation is deliberately filtered through words and action. As with magic, certain advantages occur when knowledge and timing take place. At that moment, misdirected perspective becomes the very essence of magic.

"The real trick to the concept of magic is therefore not so much what is done or the act of misdirection, but when and what knowledge is allowed to be presented."

The ability to direct and misdirect communication through knowledge can obviously become a sensitive issue. The sensitivity of knowledge is therefore not just to be found within the content, it is defined within the perspective of the presentation. Presentation context and presentation content sensitivity are part and parcel of the same things. Content sensitivity is the direct result of the aggregation of content with respect to the moment of knowledge. To fully appreciate this statement, it is necessary to consider a number of communication factors.

The absence of data and information represents communicated knowledge as much as its presence.

This is a powerful though not a particularly earth shattering statement but it is one that is ancient to the philosophy of man. (See 2020 INFOSEC ) The point is being made here in order to properly define the underlying idea of compartmented knowledge. Useful knowledge dissemination depends on the principles of knowledge compartmentation. When cryptography is involved it also must be defined in terms of the sensitivity of compartmentalized representations. (See Pointers to Knowledge )

" knowledge exists somewhere out there and it must be connected, so go get it"

This is an example where traditional thinking of trying to keep things simple makes objectives far more complex. The implications of simply applying an internal standards representation process for symbols externally makes systems rigid with respect to applications, and more importantly, because of this rigidity, it implicitly self contains content so users of the system essentially become scavengers of knowledge.

Through the Internet and Intranets, insecure surfing for knowledge is a common "scavenger" activity today because of this and though it can be considered entertaining, the need to search is primarily due to connectivity through content without management within open systems architectures. This is problematic but the solution does not lay in solving it.

There are always parallel ideals that can work better than fixing what is not considered broken. (Read Engineering Solutions .) Never the less, the underlying assumption for surfing continues to be that "knowledge exists somewhere out there and it must be connected, so go get it", that what is actually being surfed is not knowledge, but rather the pointers to and links from what may or may not be potential knowledge. This knowledge is more often than not compartmented by inherently invalidated, substandard user representations.

In the final analysis... links are first order controls representing second order connections...

The underlying problem is not that the appropriate knowledge for generating representative pointers never existed; the underlying problem is that during the coding of first order symbolic representations, pointers to relationships aggregations among multilevel knowledge were ignored, lost and abandoned. The means to aggregate knowledge in meaningful indirect ways has not existed. In the final analysis, while the data, information and knowledge at a particular web page is first order, links are first order controls representing second order connections, not second order knowledge. In a real sense, valuable perspective knowledge is lost because the rational relative knowledge is not managed.

Within the Internet we are normally working with first order representative relationships. Part of the reason is that there has been a significant cost to multilevel representative management of knowledge. Also as with an object oriented database, structures must exist in which to handle the representations. In practice however, a problem is also that it has been difficult to both secure and manage the representations. When second, third, or fourth order knowledge representations come together and are presented in an unregulated process, irregular and unacceptable, sometimes unpleasant surprises, can begin to pop up and be referenced together.

The reason it is always so absolutely necessary to search and surf to acquire data, information and knowledge is because there have been no standards in existence for the representation of dynamic aggregations of knowledge. (See Philosophy ) This is in turn because there have been no theory or technical means to automate pointer representation. This problem is a combination of a technical and academic failure to recognize and understand a complex problem involving symbolic interactionalism and the underlying relationship between rational and mathematical logic. One example of the underlying cause is that presentation level of the OSI protocol abandons the control to the application level. The standards of computer science do not address these problems because they have become artifacts of incremental continuity of technical evolution.

Until the advent of Cryptocommunications technology the relationships of symbolic representation were limited to committed expressions of directly processed logic. There was a specific hexarchy to all pointers and their possible arrays which had to be specified in advance. For instance, a pointer for a series of characters would be selected and arranged into words, into paragraphs and documents. The characters can be considered particles for the arrangement of words and the arrangement of words are particles for the paragraphs... which make up knowledge. For this reason the file document has represented the ultimate product of the computational pointer system. Traditional databases were essentially arrayed pointers related to documents and managed by the system.

Cryptocommunications creates independently secure pointers that become part of the knowledge particle and act through cryptographic key permutations which in turn force transactions to occur through the cryptographic object rather than the system. This frees the knowledge particle from the system through a universal cryptographic isolation, rather than through a system level pointer. Perhaps more importantly it functionally isolates the operating system from the absolute management of the arrangement of data and information and establishes what is essentially a meta network operating system centered around the concept of forming knowledge rather than the formation of links.

Within the concept of Cryptocommunications, the total process is never intended to be absolutely secure because no open system can be absolutely secure. Within the human mind, which is obviously where all transactions are consummated, access is always equal to access. You can assume that it is given but can never assume that once given, it was not. (See Premonitions Three Lists of Ten ) Instead the compartmentation provided by Cryptocommunications technology is arranged such that the granularity can have infinite sensitivity compartments and the knowledge particles can be infinitely fine grained.

The benefit from this more ideal way of thinking is not only the tremendous dynamic flexibility that can be achieved and the inherent multilevel security but the simple fact that the knowledge particles can be transparently filtered, managed, and rearranged without the system or the user having access to or understanding the existence or meaning of content. This means that unprecedented rational hierarchical levels of human-automated control can now be achieved.

I you examine the objectives and needs of users closely, the ideal requirements of sensitive compartmented knowledge dictate that fundamental changes are necessary to obtain and maintain the degrees of control and flexibility within future Knowledge Creation, Processing and Dissemination (KCPD) systems.

The first requirement is the elimination of predefined standards of classification to represent sensitivity. It must be recognized that explicit standards of sensitivity can never provide the necessary degrees of freedom to manage the level of complexity that sensitive compartmented knowledge represents. This means that all knowledge is unique, it all has some degree of sensitivity and it must be represented as such.
The second requirement is that sensitive compartmented knowledge actually requires appropriate compartmentation. It must be recognized that containers express economy not security. The issues of economy include the cost of dissemination. Furthermore it must be recognized that strength is a different concept from security. If a container is weaker it will fail sooner than later. It does not mean that it is any less secure during it's useful lifecycle. Appropriate compartmentation therefore does not just require acknowledgement of concepts, it requires acknowledgement of acceptable differences in languages that currently prohibit conceptual change.
The third requirement is the requirement of fundamentally intelligent multilevel cryptographic security. The only true digital security that exists involves cryptography and this fact must not be ignored. Cryptography can do far more than simply scramble bits. For sensitive compartmented knowledge to be secure it means that cryptographic control, rather than system control is required at the core of knowledge representation. To do this requires intelligent cryptography, which means inherently embedding artificial intelligence directly into cryptography. Just as biological cells require integrity, the inability of systems and subsystems to effectively generically interoperate is primarily due to the lack of integrity with respect to the processing.
The fourth requirement is that an engineering map must be accepted and adopted that would define the path of noise to knowledge. Without such a map there should be no doubt that secure knowledge engineering will go off course. It is important to maintain awareness of where the engineering process is as well as where it is leading, and that can only be accomplished if conceptual continuity is regulated through evaluation. It is also important for knowledge analysts to know and regulate the perspective and therefore the sensitivity of knowledge. The proper regulation of sensitive compartmented knowledge reduces the potential of knowledge engineering side effects that would otherwise be inherent within the technical architecture.

A great public need for cryptographic knowledge processing exists. Over the past decade I have have invented the architecture that can accomplish this, discovered the tenets and theories of the technology and tested and proven the feasibility of the first stages of research. The potential of fundamentally intelligent multilevel cryptographic processes extends to the very fabric of computer processing and knowledge creation. Intelligent cryptographic knowledge processing devices are likely to supplement or perhaps even replace the processors we understand today.

When the engineering future of Sensitive Compartmented Knowledge management practices are exploited, it will be a new marriage between technology and operations. It will change the fundamental nature and character of inter and intra knowledge processing and communication among organizations and it will generate new valuable knowledge that would not otherwise exist. Because the processing of knowledge will be inherently secure, risks can be managed through process, rather than explicit exclusion and the effective organizational operations will be able to take on new and open personas.

Since people and their organizations are communicating to everyone 24 hours a day, compartmented knowledge engineering means that the dissemination of knowledge has the great potential to become more dynamic with greater consistency and control to both friends and potential foes alike.

Transaction Control International, Inc. is currently identifying investors ready to assist us in taking on these issues. We currently have the patented technology that will support these ideas and we think that that the implications of what can be done will have a profound impact on humanity.

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