NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.
Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.”
And for all this, I'm not going to lie--that'd be a fun dataset to hack on.
And that, folks, is why we as engineers and hackers have a moral duty to be very selective in the types of work we take on and for whom.
NSA Director Keith Alexander disclosed in Senate testimony in October that the NSA had run a pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to collect “samples” of U.S. cellphone location data. The data collected were never available for intelligence analysis purposes, and the project was discontinued because it had no “operational value,” he said.
Alexander allowed that a broader collection of such data “may be something that is a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now.”
And for all this, I'm not going to lie--that'd be a fun dataset to hack on.
And that, folks, is why we as engineers and hackers have a moral duty to be very selective in the types of work we take on and for whom.