Defending NSA Prism’s Big Data Tools by Doug Henschen.
From the post:
It’s understandable that democracy-loving citizens everywhere are outraged by the idea that the U.S. Government has back-door access to digital details surrounding email messages, phone conversations, video chats, social networks and more on the servers of mainstream service providers including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, Skype and Apple.
But the more you know about the technologies being used by the National Security Agency (NSA), the agency behind the controversial Prism program revealed last week by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the less likely you are to view the project as a ham-fisted effort that’s “trading a cherished American value for an unproven theory,” as one opinion piece contrasted personal privacy with big data analysis.
Given my various posts on the Prism controversy, I felt compelled to point you to Doug Henschen’s defense of the same.
As you read Doug’s post, watch for the following themes:
Every piece of data in Accumulo can have a security label, therefore:
Accumulo makes it possible to interrogate certain details while blocking access to personally identifiable information. This capability is likely among the things James R. Clapper, the U.S. director of National Intelligence, was referring to in a statement on the Prism disclosure that mentioned “numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties.”
So the NSA has your private data but has forbidden itself to look at it. ???
We know that graph searching is effective because:
Kahn says a Sqrrl partner company that does graph analysis of internal network activity for security purposes recently identified suspicious activity using a graph algorithm. “Five days later, they got a knock on the door from the FBI letting them know that data was being exfiltrated from their network, likely by a foreign entity,” Kahn reports.
Did you spot the difference between going from a known target, the “internal network activity” to analyzing data exceeding the size of the WWW for patterns?
Apples aren’t oranges. Ever.
And Doug concludes with some unknown benefit that isn’t related to Prism:
One government insider informs InformationWeek that he knows with certainty that “semantic and visual analytics tools have prevented multiple acts of terrorism.” That insight predates recent advances in graph analysis that are undoubtedly giving the U.S. Government even more powerful tools. Privacy concerns and the desire for checks on government access to private information must be considered, but we can’t naively turn a blind eye to very real threats by not making the most of advanced big data intelligence tools now at our disposal.
Note the omission of PRISM. Yes, traditional wiretapping, surveillance, good old fashioned police work has no doubt prevent acts of terrorism.
What is lacking is PRISM playing a pivotal role in those cases.
As far as the spend any amount of money to guard against terrorism argument, consider that the U.S. population this morning was an estimated 316,075,225.
Including various supporters, etc., being generous, let’s say 10,000 Al-Qaeda members and active supporters.
Considering only the U.S. population, we have Al-Qaeda outnumbered by 3,160,752 to 1.
Do you think we are over reacting just a bit by making fighting terrorism (aside from traditional law enforcement) a priority?
Or to put it differently, who is benefiting from all those tax dollars being spend on the NSA information collecting toys?