The National Security Agency is funding a “top
secret” $60 million dollar data analysis lab at North Carolina State University
which will scrutinize information collected from private emails, phone calls
and Google searches.
“The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences will be
launched in a Centennial Campus building that will be renovated with money from
the federal agency, but details about the facility are top secret. Those who
work in the lab will be required to have security clearance from the U.S.
government,” reports the News & Observer.
The project was initially supposed to be revealed in
June, but the scandal surrounding the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program prompted
the university to delay the announcement, with faculty staff citing, “that bit
out of The Guardian (newspaper) on NSA collecting phone records of Verizon
customers.”
According to NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson, the
program will revolve around “making sense out of the deluge of data that we’re
all swimming in every day,” although the university denies that it will be
involved in “mass surveillance”.
However, according to an Associated Press
report, the data lab will analyze information collected by the NSA’s new $2
billion dollar data center in Bluffdale, Utah, which is set to
collect ”complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google
searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel
itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
According to the AP report, the new data lab will
help perfect technology that will “analyze that data for patterns identifying terrorists
and other security threats.”
The announcement of the new data center coincides
with a Washington Post report which reveals that the NSA “has broken
privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year
since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008.”
During a press conference last week, President Obama
claimed that the agency was not “actually abusing these programs and, you know,
listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s
e-mails.”
Data mining (the analysis step of the
"Knowledge Discovery in Databases" process, or KDD), an
interdisciplinary subfield of computer
science, is the computational process of discovering
patterns in large data sets involving methods at
the intersection of artificial intelligence,
machine learning,
statistics,
and database systems.
The overall goal of the data mining process is to extract information from a
data set and transform it into an understandable structure for further use.
Aside from the raw analysis step, it involves database and data
management aspects, data pre-processing,
model and inference
considerations, interestingness metrics, complexity
considerations, post-processing of discovered structures, visualization,
and online updating.
The term is a buzzword,
and is frequently misused to mean any form of large-scale data or information
processing (collection,
extraction,
warehousing,
analysis,
and statistics) but is also generalized to any kind of computer decision support system,
including artificial intelligence,
machine learning,
and business intelligence.
In the proper use of the word, the key term is discovery[citation needed],
commonly defined as "detecting something new".
Even the popular book
"Data mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques with
Java" (which covers mostly machine
learning material) was originally to be named just
"Practical machine learning", and the term "data mining"
was only added for marketing reasons. Often the more general terms "(large
scale) data analysis",
or "analytics" – or when
referring to actual methods, artificial intelligence
and machine learning.
Big Brother
is
watching us...
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