Digital
Analytics in National Security
In
today’s world of rapidly growing technology, there are billions of communications
happening everyday using a plethora of technologies to accomplish the same goal—to
communicate with each other. There are friends talking to friends, businesses
talking to businesses, and even terrorists talking to terrorists. Can
collecting and analyzing this big data actually save your life or the ones you
love?
Before we answer
that attention-grabbing question, let’s look at a few numbers:
Google
reported figures back in 2009 to the SEC that their storage capacity is well
over 100 Petabytes (That’s 1,000 Terabytes), they have over 1 trillion indexed
URLs (website names), and over 3 million servers with over 7 billion page views
per day. Facebook has over 1 billion users with a storage capacity over 300 Petabytes.
Roughly 2.5 billion items are shared each day (status updates, wall posts,
photos, videos, and comments), 2.7 billion likes per day, and 300 million
photos uploaded every day. That means its adding over 500 terabytes of new data
every single day into their databases. One interesting fact about Facebook is
that 35% of the world’s digital photography is posted to Facebook.[1]
YouTube has over 1,000 Petabytes (1 Exabyte) of storage capacity with over 72
hours of content added each minute with over 4 billion views per day. Twitter’s
numbers are also staggering with over 124 billion tweets per year or 4,500
tweets per second.[2]
Social
media is filled with big data, and we haven’t even looked at text messages,
phone calls, and emails. What about Skype, Facetime, Google Hangouts, and other
video/text chat services? There are about 6 trillion text messages sent every
year or 193,000 text messages sent per second in the United States with an
average of 876 per person each year. I know what some of you are thinking… you
know you send a lot more than that, and if you have teenagers then that number
must be multiplied by at least 20. There are 2.2 trillion cell phone calls made
per year, and to make things a little more interesting I have included a
graphic of facts about the emails we send and receive[3]
With
all this communications data, do you think it could be used to protect us from
another terrorist attack? Yes, of course!
How can
analyzing all that information protect this country?
It’s
hard enough (costly) to collect all that data, but the real value comes from
analyzing it into meaningful information that we can use to benefit our personal
or business goals. I would like to focus on the implications of all this data
in relation to national security. The current controversy about the collection
of these communications by the National Security Administration has caused many
people to feel uneasy about their right to privacy. It’s no secret that these
communications are tracked, stored, and shared with other organizations. These
databases collect a vast amount of data, but it is obviously impossible for
people to look at all of it. Because of this big data, several complex models
and algorithms scan the data based off specified tags and conditions in order
to draw conclusions.[4]
This is known as digital analytics. It would take several matching conditions, such
as a criminal investigation, for a human being to actually look at your
communications. Is it worth it to prevent a crime? Do you think the two men
responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings were communicating about their
intentions via text or any other technology prior to the event? I’m sure they
did in one way or another. Were there communications intelligence gathered
prior to September 11, 2001 that revealed the intentions of the attacks? Using the
communications data to catch “red flags” will continue to keep people safe from
such crimes.
Along
with government agencies, private companies are collecting information on you
also, as displayed in the video below:
Most
companies collect specific data on you as you browse the web and/or communicate as
do government agencies. Companies do it to target advertising to you and the
government agencies do it to protect you from people wishing to do harm.
Conclusion
All
these trillions of communications (web-based or not) are collected and stored
to make the world a better place, to save the company’s marketing dollars, give
you ads on things you actually might care about (I don’t want to see ads to buy
the Twilight series on DVD), and to protect you from harm. Social media is very
powerful and we should embrace it because it can provide real time information which can be beneficial for us to know before the media can deliver it to us.
One interesting example of the power of social media is when a man tweeted
about the raid to capture Osama Bin Laden before anyone else knew about it.
You can read his Twitter posts of the raid along
with a short introduction here.
[1] Kern, Aliza. August 22, 2012. http://gigaom.com/2012/08/22/facebook-is-collecting-your-data-500-terabytes-a-day/
[2] Hunt, Ira. Chief Technology Officer
for CIA. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUPd2uMiXXg
[4] Information Week. “Military Uses Big Data for Spy Tech.” http://www.informationweek.com/big-data/big-data-analytics/military-uses-big-data-as-spy-tech/d/d-id/1109641?
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