Up to Their Eyeballs

[marmar]

from truthdig:


Up to Their Eyeballs

Posted on Jun 20, 2013
By Bill Boyarsky


One of the most disturbing aspects of the National Security Agency surveillance scandal is the way government has reportedly worked with private companies such as Yahoo, Facebook and Google. Those companies have disputed allowing the government direct access to their servers, as was originally reported by The Washington Post and The Guardian. The technology firms, Google foremost among them, have even pressed the government to be more transparent. However it was with their help that the NSA has devised a system to sort the massive amounts of data swept up by its snooping.

The system, called Hadoop, was first disclosed by The Wall Street Journal and in depth last week by Salon. It is a way of storing, processing, classifying and analyzing billions of phone numbers, emails, texts, addresses, motor vehicle registrations, births, deaths, purchases and all of the other data we generate in our daily lives, speeding the information into the computers of such enterprises as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, as well as into the NSA database. The question to be answered is just what is being done with the data.

“Hadoop’s importance to how we live our lives today is hard to overstate,” Andrew Leonard wrote in Salon on Friday. “By making it economically feasible to extract meaning from the massive streams of data that increasingly define our online existence, Hadoop effectively enabled the surveillance state. And not just in the narrowest, Big Brother, government-is-watching-everyone-all-the-time sense of that term. Hadoop is equally critical to private sector corporate surveillance. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix—just about every big player that gathers the trillions of data ‘events’ generated by our everyday online actions employs Hadoop as a part of their arsenal of Big Data-crunching tools. Hadoop is everywhere—as one programmer told me, ‘it’s taken over the world.’ ”

I was introduced to Big Data during the last presidential campaign by Sasha Issenberg’s articles in Slate and in his book “The Victory Lab.” Issenberg wrote how a new generation of political campaigners was analyzing all this information to target voters, direct specific messages at them and make sure they got to the polls on Election Day. The process helped President Obama win re-election. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/up_to_their_eyeballs_20130620/

[xchrom]

1. du rec.

[bemildred]

2. Recording people without their permission is illegal in many places.

And yet we seem to be recording the whole planet, "just in case".

[blkmusclmachine]

3. TRUST US.

We wouldn't lie to you,

again.

.