Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 186

perspectives on its legality and constitutionality, particularly in light of
post-9/11 legislation that expands the government's power to intercept
electronic communication within the United States and abroad. With the
help of a Boeing software subsidiary, the NSA can now remotely control
software from its Maryland headquarters to search U.S. databases, includ-
ing, it now appears, 2.8 trillion billing records of telephone calls stored
in an AT&T facility covering individuals and organizations it targets for
recording, transmission, and analysis. The Utah Data Center expands the
opportunity to analyze and make use of these massive new stores of data.
Third, as daunting as it is to keep up with the growth in trafic, the
NSA has beneited from the expansion in processing power and big-data
analysis that enables the agency to actually use what it gathers to analyze
intelligence and forecast events. The agency now has the capacity to enter
a name into its database and automatically route and record all electronic
communication to and from that person. When the NSA considers it
necessary, the agency can carry out a detailed analysis of communication
content and use it to complete a risk assessment. Along with content
surveillance, the agency uses metadata to map the social networks of
individuals to determine the implications of strong and weak network
connections as well as ties that can be implied by networks of associations
among different people. Given the quantitative and qualitative expansion
in its capabilities, a former NSA employee, Walter Binney, believes that the
agency has shifted from focused collection and analysis of data on foreign
threats to gathering as much data on foreigners and Americans as the
technology allows (Bamford 2012). 2 Moreover, the predictive capability
of big-data systems makes it even more likely that the NSA and agencies
like it will collect far more data than they need. That is because improve-
ments in cracking data-encryption codes keep open the likelihood that,
if the agency cannot decipher and analyze data now, it will likely be able
to do so in the future.
The NSA is at the leading edge of a concerted program that also involves
the CIA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
and other military and intelligence organizations that put big data to
work, for example, in the controversial use of battleield attack drones.
Considering the sheer amount of data that must be processed to carry
out a successful drone attack, it is not surprising that there are signiicant
challenges to successful applications. In fact, some insiders question the