The Big Data Question
BOOK REVIEW: Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence
By Miah Hammond-Errey / Routledge
Reviewed by: Glenn S. Gerstell
The Reviewer — Cipher Brief Expert Glenn S. Gerstell is a Principal with the Cyber Initiatives Group and Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. He served as General Counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020 and writes and speaks about the intersection of technology, national security and privacy.
REVIEW — Starting roughly in 2010, the increasing popularity of social media and mobile devices was both the cause and consequence of an explosion of data about individual users – identities, location, commercial patterns and other personal details. Just how useful such information could be was revealed to the general public by the sensational disclosures in 2018 of Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of Facebook user data. But well before then, intelligence agencies had recognized the value of mass information about the digital lives of domestic and foreign citizens. Although their comments may have been aimed at a smaller and more technical audience, experts in government and academia had been examining the growing significance of big data in the process of producing national intelligence. Over the past decade, articles, scholarly journals, conferences and books have sought to explain and predict just how the acquisition, compilation and analysis of “big data” would change the way Western intelligence agencies operate.
Big Data, Emerging Technologies and Intelligence (Routledge 2024) is a slim but dense volume that surveys those discussions and seeks to distill some conclusions about what is universally (and perhaps excessively) referred to as a “transformational change.” The book grew out of a doctoral thesis by Miah Hammond-Errey, who interviewed about 50 officials of the Australian intelligence community on current practices and challenges associated with using big data for national intelligence purposes. Although the book is Australian sourced, it references Western intelligence agencies, and most of the reporting and analysis – even the parts expressly dealing with Australia – can be readily applied to the national intelligence endeavors of the United States and the United Kingdom.
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Dr. Hammon-Errey, who now directs a technology program at the University of Sydney, introduces her book by observing:
- Big data is transforming intelligence and national security…[this book] shows that the impacts of big data on the knowledge, activities and organization of intelligence agencies is challenging some foundational intelligence principles, including the distinction between foreign and domestic intelligence collection. Furthermore, the book argues that big data has created emerging threats to national security; for example, it enables invasive targeting and surveillance, drives information warfare as well as social and political interference, and challenges the existing models of harm assessment used in national security.
The book’s first task, not surprisingly, is to define “big data.” Also not surprising is the difficulty in doing so – the concept falls into the you-know-it-when-you-see-it category. Although it might not be intellectually satisfying for definitional purposes, Dr. Hammond-Errey insightfully observes that “big data is less about data that is big than it is about a capacity to search, aggregate and cross reference large data sets….It is this ability to use the data for some type of decision or action that defines big data.”
The ensuing chapters examine how big data “fuels emerging technologies…challenges fundamental intelligence principles and practices…[and creates] new social harms and national security threats.” Other chapters tackle privacy, ethics and trust issues. To anyone who has been following the discussions over the past few years about how open source and commercially available information and AI will affect intelligence analysis, the treatment of these topics in the book will seem familiar. There’s nothing pathbreaking here. Indeed, all of these chapters read more like an academic paper reporting on survey results, with pages of footnotes following every chapter. This isn’t a criticism; it’s just a statement about the nature of the volume, which, to be sure, is thoughtful and comprehensive. Although the book would hold little appeal to the casual lay reader, it would be highly useful in a university-level course on intelligence studies.
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The sophisticated reader might wish the book went into greater detail in several areas, beyond stating the obvious challenges – for example, about how emerging technologies such as AI and quantum will be affected by big data. In particular, given the crucial role of AI, details on that technology are noticeably sparse; some speculation about the future in this field would be welcome and illuminating. (Perhaps the reason the book doesn’t venture too deeply into such questions is that the survey responses themselves didn’t address that, and the author didn’t want to go – or feel confident going – beyond the responses.)
More crucially, apart from asserting that big data will be “transformational” – something that the sophisticated reader will readily acknowledge – the book is wanting in specifics about that transformation. Clearly, the advent of big data is changing intelligence collection and presents novel challenges, with the U.S. and U.K. intelligence communities already rushing to refine policies for open source information and other big data elements. Yet the implications of big data for the effectiveness of national intelligence for policy makers aren’t sketched out. In what areas will intelligence assessments be more accurate? How might analysis be speeded up? Will privacy concerns and looming legal impediments on the use of commercially available information cripple the value of big data? Will a focus on data sovereignty and limits on cross-border data flows limit access to valuable foreign information? Dr. Hammond-Errey manifestly knows the field, and one can hope that her next book might pick up where this useful volume stops, and answer such questions.
Big Data earns a solid 3 out of 4 trench coats
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