With the recent revelations brought up by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden; it underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business.
Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans. The only difference is that the NSA does it for quote “intelligence” and Silicon Valley does it to make money.
NSA has grown to become one of Silicon Valley’s largest customer for what’s known as data analytics. “We are all in these Big Data business models,” said Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellations Research. “There are a lot of connections now because the data scientists and folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests.”
Many software technology firms involved in data analytics are open about their connections to intelligence agencies.“We reached a tipping point, where the value of having user data rose beyond the cost of storing it,” said Dan Auerbach, a technology analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an electronic privacy group in San Francisco. “Now we have an incentive to keep it forever.”
Data Collection, the New Gold Rush was originally published on wzakcleveland.com
