The electronic Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality (JPC) has just released its second issue. Three guest editors assembled it: Satkartar K. Kinney, postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS); Joe Fred Gonzalez Jr., mathematical statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and Alan F. Karr, director of NISS.

The issue contains papers derived from presentations at a workshop, “Data Confidentiality: The Next Five Years,” which was held May 1–2, 2008, at NCHS headquarters in Hyattsville, Maryland. NCHS is one of several federal statistical agencies that are members of the NISS Affiliates Program. It cosponsored and co-organized the workshop with NISS.

The workshop brought together the academic and federal data confidentiality research communities, including more than 40 statisticians, computer scientists, cryptographers, and federal agency “owners” of data-confidentiality problems, with the goal of identifying important unresolved issues associated with data confidentiality. The participants articulated a research agenda to address those problems in a way that responds to current and emerging needs among federal statistical agencies. They also discussed the kinds of collaborations among statisticians, computer scientists, domain scientists, and data-owning agencies that are needed to pursue the research agenda.

This special issue of JPC includes eight papers based on nine presentations from the workshop. It is available here .