Boundless Informant
Boundless Informant (English " boundless informant ") is a classified as Top Secret Computer System of the U.S. Secret National Security Agency ( NSA). It is used to filter out of an abundance of intelligence data using the technique of data mining significant relationships - such as the communication of a single terror suspect from a plethora of e- mails and phone metadata.
Boundless informant became known on June 11, 2013 by the former NSA employee Edward Snowden in an article in the British newspaper The Guardian.
Technology
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- Discussion: Boundless Informant # Technology, 1st paragraph " amount of data and monitoring density.
The Boundless informant system collects and analyzes data with electronic espionage techniques such as the monitoring program PRISM or its predecessor, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, procured. Approaches to this technology has existed for a long time, but a reasonable way of dealing with big data, ie data amounts as by private individuals and companies nowadays in trillions amounts (2.5 x 1018 bytes per day = 2,500,000 terabytes per day) incurred until 2010 was possible. A secret document leaked to the Guardian stated that the system would be " almost real time " answers to questions such as " What listening density we have in country X? "
Big Data incurred mainly due to the explosive growth of communication via social networks and smartphones, but were previously due to their disordered structure and sheer volume as not interpretable. A study published by the Guardian interception map shows the global dimension of data analysis: Alone in March 2013 97 billion records collected the NSA therefore the world. To make the data evaluated, occurred in the intelligence community a fundamental change in the thinking approach: Instead of searching for content in the news ( phone calls, e -mails, postings ), already the data moderately small time and location stamp of messages delivered as much information about a person that you can set a motion profile and thus a monitoring profile. The mathematical tools of this form of analysis belongs especially the trilateration. The argument that you care only in certain special cases by content of messages is irrelevant for Boundless informant.
Mainframe computers and software in the field of artificial intelligence are needed to store the data for evaluation by Boundless informant as IBM manufactures, among other things in his Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The NSA is built specifically for the Utah Data Center, a data center in the mountains of Utah, which should be completed September 2013. Another Data Center of the NSA, with two-thirds the size of the Utah Data Center, is currently built at NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade.