Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 184

2013). The effectiveness of NSA activities has not always been clear, in
part because the agency collected far more information than it was able
to analyze. For this, big data provides what is hoped to be a solution by
strengthening the capacity to process data, apply analytical tools, and make
predictions. To deepen its analytical capacity, the NSA has built a close
relationship with Silicon Valley, to the extent that one analyst concluded
that “they are now in the same business” ( New York Times 2013a). Others
maintain that connections between the NSA, Microsoft, Google, Apple,
Facebook, and major telecommunications irms make up a data-intelligence
complex, a contemporary version of the military-industrial complex that
President Eisenhower criticized when he left ofice in 1960 (Luce 2013).
The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies are an increasingly essential
training ground for start-up companies. An NSA employee who left to
start a successful tech company praised the agency for putting him “on
the bleeding edge, not just the cutting edge of what's possible” (Sengupta
2013). Nevertheless, the relationship between private companies and the
intelligence agencies is far from harmonious. The scandal that arose from
revelations about NSA spying and the involvement of the major computer
and social-media companies led to business fears about a decline of public
trust in the online world. As a result, in December 2013 Apple, Yahoo!,
Facebook, Twitter, AOL, and LinkedIn joined Google and Microsoft in an
open letter to the president and Congress calling for reform and regulation
of online surveillance by government agencies (Wyatt and Miller 2013).
The 2013 NSA scandal is unlikely to slow the construction of an
NSA cloud data center in Utah for the storage, processing, analysis, and
forecasting needs of the agency, estimated to cost $2 billion (Bamford
2012). As journalists who have tried to investigate what is benignly called
the Utah Data Center have learned, the site is shrouded in the secrecy
that one has come to expect from the NSA (Hill 2013). After all, it is
hardly surprising that an agency whose budget is kept secret from public
scrutiny (estimates range in the tens of billions of dollars) would not open
the doors of its latest big project. According to one of the world's leading
experts on the NSA, “Flowing through its servers and routers and stored
in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, includ-
ing the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google
searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel
itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter.' It is, in