Shane Harris has details:
The doomsday thinkers over at DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] are looking for researchers to “investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources.” The question is, could a determined data miner use only publicly available information — culled from Web pages and social media or from a consumer data broker — to cause “nation-state type effects.” Forget identify theft. DARPA appears to be talking about outing undercover intelligence officers; revealing military war plans; giving hackers a playbook for taking down a bank; or creating maps of sensitive government facilities.
The irony is delicious. At the time government officials are assuring Americans they have nothing to fear from the National Security Agency poring through their personal records, the military is worried that Russia or al Qaeda is going to wreak nationwide havoc after combing through people’s personal records.
Update from a reader:
A few points of information/correction:
– DARPA is not the NSA.
– Open-source and commercially-available data are not the same as (ostensibly) private “personal records” such as phone call metadata, emails, and chat contents.
– Government officials aren’t “assuring Americans they have nothing to fear from the NSA poring through their personal records”; they are trying to assure Americans that they don’t pore through their personal records, but instead that they (merely) collect lots of personal records to make it easier to identify which (supposedly tiny) fraction of records to pore over, and to make it feasible to do so quickly. Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but that’s precisely the crux of the controversy, IMHO.
In addition, the structure of the story here (such as it is) is parallel to the government saying “we need military weapons systems to protect you, but military weapons systems may be dangerous in the wrong hands.” You may disagree with their logic or the content of their assertions, but I don’t see any irony there.
The Dish 