Beyond the buzzword: big data and national security decision-making

Abstract

This article explores the role big data play in the national security decision-making process. The global surveillance disclosures initiated by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have increased public and academic discussions about big data and national security. Yet, efforts to summarize and import insights from the vast and interdisciplinary literature on data analytics have remained rare in the field of security studies. To fill this gap, we explain the core characteristics of big data, provide an overview of the techniques and methods of data analytics, and explore how big data can support the core national security process of intelligence. We find that data analytics tools contribute to and influence all the core intelligence functions in the contemporary US national security apparatus. However, these tools cannot replace the central role of humans and their ability to contextualize security threats. In the last decade, big data has been an ubiquitous buzzword in academic and professional circles and in the media. Some commentators have praised big data as 'the new oil of the 21 st century', 'the world's most valuable resource' and 'the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming'. 1 The growth of big data analytics can be explained from a market-based perspective. On the supply side, data have become more readily available and processing power has kept increasing-as predicted by Moore's Law in the 1970s. Rapid advances in instrumentation and sensors, digital storage and computing, communications and networks, including the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, have spurred an ineluctable march towards the 'big data revolution', 2 generating and giving access to more and more data. Every day, humans directly or indirectly create 2.5 trillion megabytes of data. 3 As increasingly large amounts of data are captured from humans, machines,

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