“Cell phones, laptops, Facebook, Skype, chat-rooms: all allow the NSA to build what it calls ‘a pattern of life,’ a detailed profile of a target and anyone associated with them.” — The Guardian

What if a surveillance program based on the same mosaic theory principles as the NSA’s PRISM could be used to monitor government activity in deep detail? Could such a platform be enabled by the push for open data?

To what extent was PRISM possible because data the NSA absorbed was already well organized by the private companies — Google, Facebook, Apple, among others — that housed it, and whose commercial success depended on it being well organized?

Could equally well organized public information produced by government spur the development of a “People’s PRISM”?

I suspect that if the vast world of public information, nationally, were as efficiently organized as the “private” data we pour into the web’s for-profit companies, it could enable a system that produces a very revealing picture of what even top secret parts of our government are up to.

Don’t get me wrong — I have no expectation that open data policies will pry open classified caches, but for a People’s PRISM to work, they don’t need to. PRISM was built on the premise that you can deduce a target’s actions by analyzing aggregated content about their activities rather than trying to observe discrete steps.

As the immovable object of swollen government bureaucracy rushes to slap “Top Secret” on as many documents as possible, it collides with unstoppable forces both inside government and out who advocate fervently for open data as a salve for inefficiency and a stimulant for economic development.

As data becomes available, companies rush to organize it, index it, and make it available for use in myriad platforms. As they do, the potential for someone to build a system that draws from these companies’ efforts, using multiple data sources to triangulate and reveal even secretive government activity, increases.

Perhaps we’ll look back on WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden as potent, but crude, beginnings in this story. With a data dump, time marches on and data goes stale. You need regular updates — regular leakers — to keep a relevant lens on the subject. But a system that enables analysis of government activity based on aggregating conduct, rather than relying on the unveiling of discrete steps… well, that’s a powerful thing.