The intelligence community is still grappling with ways to exploit open source and new media data “socially, legally and economically so that there is no misuse,” he added. Protecting users’ civil liberties can mean not exposing the government’s interest in the data, Cambone said: “There’s no yes-or-no answer -- it will take a long time to work through.”
Co-author Len Moodispaw, a National Security Agency veteran now head of KeyW Corp, noted that with social media, “people can put out falsehoods, and the intelligence officials have to be quiet, even though they may look like idiots.”
Third author Carmen Medina, a former director of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence now with Deloitte, said, “the big data revolution’s digital exhaust” requires intelligence professionals to consider that in the future, what will be classified are the methodologies for analyzing data rather than the data themselves. “A lot of intelligence is like political punditry,” which is in danger of being overshadowed by data analytics, she said. The civil liberties challenges mean that “if there’s no way for us to adjust that is congenial, we may have to just live with it, but let’s have the conversation.”