CIA and Amazon Agreement to Record Social Network Data

The announcement comes from the chief technology officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. The objective: to construct a dedicated information cloud to preserve phone calls, texts, emails, conversations and “likes” from Facebook and Twitter. The protection of the country is about connecting the dots.

A giant black hole swallows and records phone calls, texts, emails, conversations and “likes” on Facebook, messages on Twitter, videos and every other type of information that millions and millions of users post every second on the network. The CIA wants to collect as much as possible and have it on hand “forever,” allowing it to analyze it with the aim of guaranteeing the security of the United States. Chief Technology Officer of the CIA, Ira “Gus” Hunt, explained it in New York. The announcement, writes The Huffington Post, came two days after the news of the agreement with Amazon, which will provide the agency with the technology to construct a dedicated information cloud to preserve quantities of information never before imagined.

Big data are the present and future of intelligence, and the American secret services are gearing up to guarantee the possibility of computing “on all human generated information.” The “all-source analysis” relates all the available information — “connecting the dots” — and informs the president and the secretary of defense, explained Hunt on Wednesday at the GigaOM Structure: Data conference in New York.

“The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else which arrives at a future point in time …. we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it ‘forever.’” The word is “big data,” large sets of information created by the dizzying development of digital media, especially social networks: “Roughly 35 percent of all the world’s digital photography gets put onto Facebook,” and “Twitter is about 124 billion tweets a year.”

The scenarios are worrying: a global “Big Brother.” “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human generated information,” says Hunt. Obviously, the declared intention is to protect the United States from enemies and international terrorism, avoiding the mistakes of the past. “We do want to stop the next ‘underwear bomber,'” Hunt explained, referring to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab who, in December 2009, managed to board Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit with a pentaerythritol trinitrate explosive device hidden in his undergarments. “Though all of the information was available to all source analysts at the CIA and the [National Counter Terrorism Center] prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected,” reads a 2010 White House report. To guarantee the security of the U.S., “we need an environment in which to put all of our data,” and that allows it to be matched easily with other information through “this funny little thing called the cloud.”

According to Federal Computer Week, the site for managers of the federal government, it is done: Thanks to a $600 million, 10-year contract, Amazon will help the agency to construct a private cloud computing infrastructure, which will allow it to keep pace with the evolution of the world of big data and, at the same time, contain the costs. “Historically,” writes Federal Computer Week, “the CIA’s cloud computing strategy centered on a number of smaller, highly specific private clouds …. this contract essentially brings a public cloud computing environment inside the secure firewalls of the intelligence community, thereby negating concerns of classified data being hosted in any public environment.”

Neither Amazon nor the CIA has confirmed the news. But already, on March 12, CIA Chief Information Officer Jeanne Tisinger explained to the Northern Virginia Technology Council that the agency was working “with companies like Amazon.” In February 2012, Hunt announced wanting to buy “pay-as-you-go” technology, according to the Amazon model. It is a useful collaboration for both — the CIA will save money in a period of crisis and budget cuts, with the government able to play it on the electoral level, while Amazon will be able to demonstrate the ability to construct hyper-secure clouds even for private buyers. The road is paved: The CIA is hiring staff highly specialized in the management of big data. An article posted on the agency site last November 29 reads, “The CIA wants people who know how to develop computational algorithms and statistical methods to find patterns and relationships in large volumes of data.”