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DARPA Fears Big Data Could Become Big Threat

Posted by Soulskill on from the we've-discovered-that-al-qaeda-is-incorporating-'data'-into-their-plans dept.

Nerval's Lobster writes "For most businesses, data analytics presents an opportunity. But for DARPA, the military agency responsible for developing new technology, so-called 'Big Data' could represent a big threat. DARPA is apparently looking to fund researchers who can 'investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources.' That means developing tools that can evaluate whether a particular public dataset will have a significant impact on national security, as well as blunt the force of that impact if necessary. 'The threat of active data spills and breaches of corporate and government information systems are being addressed by many private, commercial, and government organizations,' reads DARPA's posting on the matter. 'The purpose of this research is to investigate data sources that are readily available for any individual to purchase, mine, and exploit.' As Foreign Policy points out, there's a certain amount of irony in the government soliciting ways to reduce its vulnerability to data exploitation. 'At the time government officials are assuring Americans they have nothing to fear from the National Security Agency poring through their personal records,' the publication wrote, 'the military is worried that Russia or al Qaeda is going to wreak nationwide havoc after combing through people's personal records.'"

1 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. ITT... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Redundant

    ITT: Tards miss the point and get modded "+5, Confirms Groupthink" by making idiotic and irrelevant posts bashing:
    - the NSA;
    - Pres. Obama;
    - Facebook;
    - Google;
    - Apple;

    ITT: Neckbeards who live to whine about their imagined rights to privacy declare that the government should be fully transparent and not allowed any secrets, while missing the multitudinous shades of gray where some secrets are necessary for any society to function, and missing the additional irony that a "transparent" government would do more to invade their privacy than any Eddy "Good Times" Snowden clones at the NSA.

    ITT: Idiots don't even realize what the DARPA project is about, and why it's a legitimate area of research and concern for national security.

    ITT: Fools pretend that massive "public data" sets -- published by the government as a result of DEMANDS FOR TRANSPARENCY from the 2nd group listed above -- can contain lots of actionable information, and as the Netflix fiasco showed (cited by the DARPA proposal itself), can often be easily - even trivially - de-anonymized.

    But yeah, let's just keep shouting about the NSA, rather than actually assess the problem and try to find solutions that don't require us to nuke all of our factories back to a mid-1800's agrarian culture.