(This post was first published at Knee Jerk)
Ignorance it seems is bliss, that is our ignorance would be bliss to those that spy upon us. With so many revelations coming from the Snowden leaks it’s hard to keep up with what those whacky dudes over at the NSA and GCHQ are up to. Yesterday a bunch of e-mail services shut down rather than risk giving customer data to the spooks, the Germans decide it would be super special if they just turned on encryption between mail servers – but the spooks weren’t to be out done. They have decide that they need to tackle the next big security threat – having had it revealed how useful big data is to them, they have realised it might be used against tham! That’s right all that public data out there could be useful to people that object to what they’re doing. So they’re going to spend a bunch of American tax dollars to make sure that public data isn’t useful to the bad guys which from their recent behavior means everyone else. After all it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that someone looking at a public satellite photo on google earth might see a pixilated building in the middle of a clear photo and decide that might be something interesting. Worse we might look at politicians voting records and see which of them have supported mass intrusion into our private data. No siree such misuse of public data can’t be allowed to happen
Their ultimate goal is “to design a real-world tool that can monitor open source data sets in real time, measure vulnerabilities and then provide defensive countermeasures.” – or in possibly more honest terms they want to watch out for useful data and then take steps to make it less so.
Obviously I would never suggest that the spooks have anything other than our very best interests at heart, and will only take the least possible action to protect the national good and won’t ever be influenced by political goals or their own self interest. However it does seem that some data analysis may be more equal than others.
