Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 187

expansion of drone programs because they require processing capabilities
that exceed today's budgetary and technological limits (Beidel 2012).
Pushing ahead, in 2012 the federal government announced spending of
more than $200 million on big-data military and civilian research and
development. According to the press release accompanying its announce-
ment of the “Big Data Initiative,” the Department of Defense (DOD) will
“place a big bet on Big Data” with $60 million in new annual spending.
The goal is to “accelerate innovation in Big Data” that will “improve situ-
ational awareness to help warighters and analysts and provide increased
support to operations. The Department is seeking a 100-fold increase in
the ability of analysts to extract information from texts in any language,
and a similar increase in the number of objects, activities, and events that
an analyst can observe” (U.S. Ofice of Science and Technology Policy
2012). This funding is expected to signiicantly expand the military's
drone attack program (Beidel 2012).
Along with the DOD initiative, DARPA announced an investment of
$25 million a year in its XDATA program to overcome current limitations
in big-data analysis. Speciically, it is focusing on developing software and
other computational tools, such as improved algorithms and visual repre-
sentations, to examine the semistructured and unstructured data in text
documents and message trafic. The announcement did not include the
NSA or the CIA, whose programs are not publicized in press announce-
ments and whose spending is kept separate from DOD authorizations.
It is hard to say whether the bad publicity that the NSA has attracted
in the wake of revelations about the extent of its surveillance activities,
especially against Americans, will dampen the government's commitment
to expanding the military use of the cloud and big data. This is unlikely.
While the names of programs change (today it is Prism, tomorrow some-
thing else), the NSA has been in the surveillance business for more than
half a century and its work is vital to U.S. spy operations. Nevertheless,
some rethinking is likely because revelations of electronic surveillance
on the ofices of allies, particularly in the European Union and in Latin
America, have created enough anger to damage relations to the point
of threatening sensitive trade negotiations (Castle 2013). Indeed, some
analysts are wondering aloud whether revelations about NSA activities will
signiicantly undermine support for cloud computing worldwide (Linthi-
cum 2013d). One think tank estimates losses to the U.S. cloud industry