Increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency reflect the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans. The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money, James Risen and Nick Wingfield report in The New York Times.
Silicon Valley has what the National Security Agency wants: vast amounts of private data and the most sophisticated software available to analyze it. The agency in turn is one of Silicon Valley’s largest customers for hat is known as data analytics, one of the valley’s fastest-growing markets. To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, United States intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Max Kelly, a former chief security officer for Facebook.
“We are all in these Big Data business models,†said Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation Research, based in San Francisco. “There are a lot of connections now because the data scientists and the folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests.â€
One example: When Mr. Kelly left Facebook in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead, the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.
The disclosure of the spy agency’s program called Prism, which is said to collect the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, een as they acknowledge complying with secret N.S.A. court orders for specific data.
Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. and the rise of data mining â€" both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool â€" have created a more complex reality.
“These worlds overlap,†said Philipp S. Krüger, chief executive of Explorist, an Internet start-up in New York.
