The NSA's Big Data Problem

Security agencies are tracking us, but the real challenge is making sense of it all

By Bryan Walsh Monday, June 24, 2013

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    In fact, some of that NSA-derived technology has already made its way to the private sector. Sqrrl, an enterprise-software start-up in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by some of the same engineers who developed Accumulo for the NSA. The company is not connected to the NSA beyond those origins, but it's now bringing that database power to civilians, including the ability to create massive indexes that can be searched in much the same way that the Web is. "The whole purpose we have is to bring more data sets together and to make it less expensive to build applications out of them," says Ely Kahn, a co-founder of Sqrrl.

    As databases continue to grow, big data will only get bigger. "The availability of the data leads to more tools to analyze it, and the availability of the tools leads to more collection of data," says Chris Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's an unpleasant circle." And that creates one more big-data challenge, one that can't be answered with algorithms: how it should be used.

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