Thwarting Malicious Assaults on Democracy: A Compelling Role for Big Data Analytics

Abstract

This paper proposes a patriotic/statesman application for big data analytics. A legal, regulatory and political economy/policy analysis examines malicious assaults on two mechanisms of American democracy. First, counterfeit notice and comment (informal) rulemaking and second, election meddling by adversarial foreign entities. Big data architectures are analyzed under existing law, including, inter alia, election mechanics regulation, administrative procedure as supplemented by prohibitions against fraud, conspiracy, impersonation, and money-laundering. Remediation is proposed (anonymous speech exceptions, social media regulation, mandatory regulator analytical research) as inspired by big data analytics methods, including, inter alia, discovery and marshalling of widely dispersed data, permissions and access barriers to accumulating big data sets, construction of useful data compilations, development of analytical tools - pattern analysis, data provenance, and exposure of opaque relationships.