CIA Chief Technology Officer: we collect everything we can and store it forever | Privacy SOS.
When the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer, Gus Hunt, spoke at a GigaOm conference last week in New York, he told the audience that the CIA collects and stores every bit of information it can get its hands on, and then deploys data mining tools to extract meaning from the swirling and ever growing matrix. (You can see the slides from his talk here.)
“The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time. Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever,” he said.
Hunt’s talk, embedded above, works from the assumption that data mining can identify terrorist threats. But that’s a faulty, if widely held, view. The National Academy of Sciences studied the question back in 2008 and found that it is “not feasible” to successfully deploy data mining in terrorism prevention. On the other hand, the aggregation and mining of data about all of us is all but guaranteed to have a substantial impact on our privacy and civil liberties.
A Conservative Edge 