CIA and Amazon Agreement to Record Social Network Data

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/201729/cia-and-amazon-agreement-to-record-social-network-data/

The announcement comes from the chief technology officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. The objective: to construct a dedicated information cloud to preserve phone calls, texts, emails, conversations and "likes" from Facebook and Twitter. The protection of the country is about connecting the dots

CIA and Amazon Agreement to Record Social Network Data
Il Fatto Quotidiano, Italy
By Marco Quarantelli
Translated By Micaela Bester
24 March 2013
Edited by Ketu­rah Hetrick

A giant black hole swallows and records phone calls, texts, emails, conversations and "likes" on Facebook, messages on Twitter, videos and every other type of information that millions and millions of users post every second on the network. The CIA wants to collect as much as possible and have it on hand "forever," allowing it to analyze it with the aim of guaranteeing the security of the United States. Chief Technology Officer of the CIA, Ira "Gus" Hunt, explained it in New York. The announcement, writes the Huffington Post, came two days after the news of the agreement with Amazon, which will provide the agency with the technology to construct a dedicated information cloud to preserve quantities of information never before imagined.

Big data are the present and future of intelligence, and the American secret services are gearing up to guarantee the possibility of computing "on all human generated information." The "all-source analysis" relates all the available information ("connecting the dots&quot and informs the president and the secretary of defense, explained Hunt on Wednesday at the GigaOM Structure : Data conference in New York.

"The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else which arrives at a future point in time.... we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it ‘forever.’" The word is "big data," large sets of information created by the dizzying development of digital media, especially social networks: "Roughly thirty-five percent of all the world's digital photography gets put onto Facebook," and "Twitter is about 124 billion tweets a year."

The scenarios are worrying: a global "Big Brother." "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” says Hunt. Obviously, the declared intention is to protect the United States from enemies and international terrorism, avoiding the mistakes of the past. "We do want to stop the next 'underwear bomber,'" Hunt explained, referring to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who, in December 2009, managed to board Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit with a PETN explosive device hidden in his undergarments. "Though all of the information was available to all-source analysts at the CIA and the [National Counter Terrorism Center] prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected," reads a 2010 White House report. To guarantee the security of the U.S., "we need an environment in which to put all of our data," and that allows it to be matched easily with other information through "this funny little thing called the Cloud.”

[Demeter]

1. Oh yes, because every serious, dedicated Terrorist Posts Nefarious Plots on Facebook

Give me a break! This is about blackmail and pretext for murder...NOt security!

[leveymg]

2. The Underwear Bomber would never have gotten onto that flight without the CIA.

Even though this sort of thing has been going on repeatedly back to 9/11, the chutzbah of these people claiming they never have enough information or budget or manpower or luck to "connect the dots" just never ceases to amaze.

[bemildred]

3. It's all bullshit.

That big pile of unstructured data is useless, as they admit unintentionally.

[leveymg]

4. It's a huge pork belly for Amazon is what it amounts to.

Nobody ever says no to Amazon. Never. When you get powerful commercial concerns into positions of vested entitlement to gov't programs, there's no getting rid of or containing their avarice. Privatization of intelligence functions is a full-fledged disaster and a danger to us all.

[bemildred]

5. I used to work in defense IT.

We'd get these "collectors" all the time. No matter how big a disk you gave them, they would fill it up with crap from the net. Didn't matter much what kind of crap, they never did anything with it, old software versions, smut, movies, pictures, documents, and on and on and on ...

You know they cannot hire enough people to actually read and understand it all, and you know the computer is capable of only the most ham-handed mechanistic sort of analysis, so it's a big pile of crap that they hope eventually to find a use for. Meanwhile you have an endless money tit for buying the latest hardware (and they whine at us every day that we have no money.)

[leveymg]

7. How many real terrorists or spies have ever been identified this way?

Count 'em on one hand, maybe two, I bet. What's the cost per head - $5 billion/terrorist, $10 billion. What's the total cost of these programs - $80 billion, $100 billion? Am I being too conservative?

Could any of those guys actually do all that much damage?

[mother earth]

6. More taxpayer funded looney escapades for the Criminals in Action. Privacy, what privacy? Terror

is the new black.