Quote from Bernard Chazelle

Bernard Chazelle:

Any terrorist aware of the hazards of Big Data knows that spurious correlations increase faster than data size and so will pray that the NSA keeps a diary of all life forms on the planet. If you’re a needle hiding in a haystack, all you want is more hay, like, say, a yottabyte worth of it. Bad guys will love Big Data. Social activists not so much. If the next J. Edgar Hoover doesn’t fancy the cut of your jib, he’ll come after you, file servers blazing, with more details about your past than you’ll ever remember. No need to be unduly paranoid, though. The craven Chinese may have hacked into the Obama and Romney campaigns, but thank God no American president would ever break into the party headquarters of his rival. Thank God the FBI would never spread lies about a university administrator. Thank God it would never pressure a civil rights leader to commit suicide. Let’s not surrender to cynicism and imagine that anything like McCarthyism could ever happen in the United States. We don’t call it the land of the free for nothing.