Ars Technica: What the NSA Can Do With "Big Data". PRISM is Google for spooks.
One of the talking points I'm getting is that "the NSA doesn't have the telco resources, hard drive space, computing power to do all the eavesdropping that Snowdon claims."
I have one word to rebut that claim: Google.
Seriously. Go to google.com. I assume you're familiar with it. What can you find on the web when you type in a few words about anything at all?
Quite a lot. And this is what we get to play with in civilian-land.
Type in your own name, and you're going to find information on yourself. Type in a phone number, and chances are good one of the search results will have its owner.
Compare Google and the NSA.
Two large entities with tens-to-hundreds of billions of dollars of computing & telco infrastructure
Two large entities that have spent billions of dollars researching getting their computers to find useful information in oceans of data.
One of them is accessible to any idiot who can click a mouse. The other is accessible only to the High Priesthood of the Cult of National Security, which requires you to take the Oath of Omerta before they let you look.
But I'll bet that the kinds of things that the people at the NSA have at the tips of their fingers, simply by typing words into a search box is at least as interesting as what you can find just by playing around on Google.
And that's what Snowden's trying to tell us. You say his claims are far-fetched? That there's too much out there on the Internet and in the phone system for them to be able to dig through?
Google says that's not true. And Google's the civilian-level technology. PRISM is Google for spooks.
Anyways, on to the article on the kind of technology America's Stasi can bring to bear.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/what-the-nsa-can-do-with-big-data/
The NSA can't capture everything that crosses the Internet—but doesn't need to.
One organization's data centers hold the contents of much of the visible Internet—and much of it that isn't visible just by clicking your way around. It has satellite imagery of much of the world and ground-level photography of homes and businesses and government installations tied into a geospatial database that is cross-indexed to petabytes of information about individuals and organizations. And its analytics systems process the Web search requests, e-mail messages, and other electronic activities of hundreds of millions of people.
No one at this organization actually "knows" everything about what individuals are doing on the Web, though there is certainly the potential for abuse. By policy, all of the "knowing" happens in software, while the organization's analysts generally handle exceptions (like violations of the law) picked from the flotsam of the seas of data that their systems process.
I'm talking, of course, about Google. Most of us are okay with what Google does with its vast supply of "big data," because we largely benefit from it—though Google does manage to make a good deal of money off of us in the process. But if I were to backspace over Google's name and replace it with "National Security Agency," that would leave a bit of a different taste in many people's mouths.
Yet the NSA's PRISM program and the capture of phone carriers' call metadata are essentially about the same sort of business: taking massive volumes of data and finding relationships within it without having to manually sort through it, and surfacing "exceptions" that analysts are specifically looking for. The main difference is that with the NSA, finding these exceptions can result in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to dig deeper—and FBI agents knocking at your door.
So what is it, exactly, that the NSA has in its pile of "big data," and what can they do with it?.
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