In a Wednesday speech in New York City to an audience oftechnology experts assembled for GigaOM’s Structure: Dataconference, Hunt admitted the intelligence community has longsought a database to store text messages, tweets, Facebookactivity, videos and any other information Americans make available- intentionally or otherwise.
“Technology in this world is moving faster than government orlaw can keep up,” he said. “It’s moving faster, I wouldargue, than you can keep up. You should be asking the question ofwhat are your rights and who owns your data.”
Hunt said CIA analysts have been at work on new algorithms thatwill break down vast amounts of information into easily digestibletools that allow them to closely examine trends in the public. Theagency will then be able to base its covert strategies off thoseresults.
“The value of any piece of technology is only known when youcan connect it with something else that arrives at a future pointin time,” he added. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’thave ... we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on toit forever.”
Earlier in March Federal Computer Week reported that the CIAagreed on a contract with Amazon that will allow the government todevelop a private cloud infrastructure, thereby keeping up with thesame technology Hunt alluded to during his speech on Wednesday.
In the past the CIA’s intelligence model has relied on small,more specific cloud servers that didn’t have the capability thefuture service presumably will.
During his speech, Hunt stressed that the CIA will collectinformation on individuals thought to be America's enemies,evaluate it quickly, and act on those assertions. Along with theAmazon partnership – which neither side would officially recognizeto media outlets – Hunt’s speech alluded to the “underwear bomber,”who was foiled in his attempt to blow up an airliner on Christmasof 2009. A 2010 report from the White House explained how the AlQaeda plot made it as far as it did.
“Though all of the information was available to all-sourceanalysts at the CIA and the [National Counter Terrorism Center]prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected, andas a result, the problem appears to be more a component failure to‘connect the dots,’ rather than a lack of information sharing,”the report read.
Based on Hunt’s comments it would appear that the CIA isprepared to fill in those gaps by any methods in its grasp.
“You are aware of the fact that somebody can know where youare at all times, because you carry a mobile device, even if thatmobile device is turned off,” Hunt said. “You’re already awalking sensor platform - you know this, I hope? Yes? Well, youshould."
