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This is one of those “it’s worse than you think” things that won’t really hurt much. It’ll just cost money. And a few lives.
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Tools like Palantir are the tip of an iceberg: a gigantic iceberg of data. In case you don’t know, when organizations like the NSA are talking “big data” they are talking “yottabytes.” i.e.:
The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) [wired]
I am having trouble getting to rt.com (Russia Times, right?)
During the “Arab Spring” (what a loathsome, patronizing, attitude we express!) the US Government repeatedly socialized ideas about how Twitter, etc, were important to helping anti-government protests, i.e.:
The Obama administration, while insisting it is not meddling in Iran, yesterday confirmed it had asked Twitter to remain open to help anti-government protesters. [guardian]
Yesterday I discussed the retro-scope of information-gathering[1] and I probably should have mentioned that President Obama – along with commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence – handed the citizens of the US a great big “F.U.” Just before leaving office he quietly changed how the NSA is allowed to share information, considerably expanding the power of the intelligence apparatus.
In an email, I am asked:
Assuming that the current administration is completely unaccountable to law, is it *technically* possible for them to data mine the electronic communications of their political opponents?
Data destruction is a part of good systems administration; you should design it in to your understanding of how you use your systems.
… At the very thought of this horribly-named “Internet of Things” device. It’s not quite as bad as the fleshlight that doubles as a stick-blender,* but the name:
I talk to venture capitalists a fair bit because I’ve been involved in a bunch of start-ups and technical advisory boards. And I do an interview column for Searchsecurity, where I try to interrogate interesting people in order to find out how they got interesting. This morning I was transcribing the audio of an interview I did with a woman executive who was a venture capitalist for years, then went on to start her own company.
It’s fairly rare to find woman executives who are willing to talk about gender bias, because, I’m sure it just increases their inter-cranial pressure to the explosion point. But we went there, anyway.
Over at warisboring (one of my favorite blogs) there’s an article about the drone pilot who is collecting so much footage of the police brutality at Standing Stones Camp.