CIA Presentation – Big data

On Wednesday last week the CIA’s chief technology Officer (Ira “Gus” Hunt) detailed the companies plans for handling “big data”, collecting and analyzing huge data sets on the movements and actions of people on the internet.

The presentation came only a few days after the CIA announced it was going to be signing up for a cloud computing contract with Amazon reportedly worth up-to £400 million (GBP) to house the huge data sets they collect.

Big data has been a huge buzz word in the advertising industry for a while now and it seems the CIA are using similar techniques to those used by digital marketeers to better target their communications and to identify who clients core customers are.

Key points from the presentation include detailing how smart phones can function as walking sensor platforms and the fact people can be identified with 100% accuracy simply from the way they walk with a smart phone in their pocket (using the built in accelerometer, GPS and other sensors now built into most smart phones). The implication of this is essentially it is possible to identify someone using another persons phone.

“You’re already a walking sensor platform,” Hunt said, referring to all of the information captured by smartphones. “You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where you are at all times because you carry a mobile device, even if that mobile device is turned off. You know this, I hope? Yes? Well, you should.”

Hunt also talks about the challenges faced by the CIA in analyzing the data and “connecting the dots”.  He goes on to say “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever,”… “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information.” 

You can see the full presentation below;