Commentary: NSA and Big Data: Crazy Stupid Love

Siobhan MacDermott | SPECIAL FOR USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO -- In 2010, then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt told attendees at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, Calif., that humanity was now creating as much information every two days as it did from the dawn of civilization up to 2003 --every 48 hours, 5 exabytes, or 5 quintillion bytes (5 followed by 18 zeros).

A stunning statistic? Even more stunning is the apparent fact the NSA intends to capture pretty much every one of those bytes every second of every day -- forever.

In a world in which several terabytes (1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes) can fit on a solid state drive (SSD) the size of a credit card, how else to explain the perceived need for the massive $2 billion NSA facility under construction in the shadow of Utah's Wasatch Range -- an edifice that "will be more than five times the size of the U.S. Capitol"?

No wonder the agency is facing what Hoover Institution fellows Amy Zegart and Marshall Erwin call "the worst crisis in its 60-year history."

The massive monument to surveillance rising in Utah speaks far louder and much more clearly than anything NSA leaders have said to explain and justify the agency's mission. Does the NSA exist to discover terrorist "chatter" and outright plots? Does it function to keep Americans safe, and to prevent the next 9/11?

Well, as far as we can tell from the 6.5 million-cubic-foot structure out west, no. From all appearances, the NSA mission is to track everything and spy on everyone all of the time.

Facing its worst crisis of image ever, the NSA needs to rebrand itself.

Now, in defending the image of the agency against the leaks of Edward Snowden, NSA director General Keith Alexander has accused the media of exaggerating the scope of NSA surveillance programs and has suggested that if Americans only understood what the agency actually does, their anxieties over Big Brother would be allayed and their appreciation for the mission greatly increased.

So, if what General Alexander says is right -- the more we know about the NSA, the more we will support what it does -- then the obvious first step toward rebranding is a combination of transparency and education. Come clean about the mission -- not the nitty-gritty details, perhaps, but the scope and purpose -- and explain NSA in a way that corrects both the alleged media hype and the impression created by that really, really big building in Utah.

An October 2013 poll commissioned by the Hoover Institution in effect tested Alexander's assertion. As Zegart and Erwin explain, "Our initial hunch was that Americans knew little about the intelligence agencies that have kept us safe since 9/11, and that public ignorance was compounding the NSA's trust problems."

What the poll demonstrated, however, is that ignorance not only did not breed greater distrust of the NSA, but "the more that Americans understand the NSA's activities, the less they support the agency." For example: "Among those who erroneously believed the NSA conducts operations to kill terrorists, 35% had an unfavorable view of the agency. Among those who answered this question correctly, 64% viewed the NSA unfavorably."

It turns out that rehabilitating the NSA brand will take more than transparency and education. It will take compelling proof NSA programs really are effective counter-terrorism tools. Obviously, providing this proof requires programs that are, in fact, effective. An absolute precondition for developing such programs is fringing to an end the agency's all-consuming love affair with Big Data. If Big Data is a haystack, the information we actually want, the useful information, is a needle. To find the terrorist threat -- our coveted needle of useful information -- why would we begin the search by making the Big Data haystack bigger?

The NSA mission is intelligence. All the data humanity produces every day is not intelligence. It is data -- a lot of data. Intelligence is, well, intelligent. And the intelligent approach to collecting data is to identify the right data to collect, collect it, analyze it, and leave the rest of it alone.

If the NSA is to reclaim the value of its brand, it needs to become an intelligent consumer of data rather than a compulsive hoarder, whose monstrously omnivorous habits elicit from the public sentiments including disgust, fear, outrage and morbid curiosity -- the emotional drivers of reality TV.

What the National Security Agency desperately needs right now are acceptance, support and gratitude.

Siobhan MacDermott is chief policy officer at AVG Technologies. She is author of Wide Open Privacy -- Strategies for the Digital Life and Cybermilitia -- A Citizen's Strategy to Fight, Win and End War in Cyberspace.