CIA to Invest in Big Data APIs

The Information age has changed the way we live our lives – from social networking apps that alert us to our friends’ activities, to tiny cameras on street corners. This kind of data interaction is what the U.S. Intelligence community is trying to achieve, only with the seedier side of society.

In-Q-Tel (News - Alert) (IQT), the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital branch, is investing in Apigee to help government intelligence agencies improve data sharing via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). 

"The Apigee platform can support organizations at varying stages of their API initiatives, from building effective APIs to creating meaningful business intelligence from their app ecosystems," Robert Ames (News - Alert), senior VP of IQT's information and communication technologies practice, said in a statement. "We believe that our government customers will be able to benefit from this comprehensive set of capabilities."

Apigee currently supports Walgreens, eBay and Dell (News - Alert). Using a cloud-based API platform, Apigee has the expertise to remove the obstacles in delivering APIs. IQT is betting on the company’s ability to serve up big data to all of the CIA’s customers regarding the movements and activities of known and suspected terrorists. Since the attacks on 9-11, the problem has not been finding or collecting enough data but gathering all the respective information in one place from multiple sources.

This is nothing new. Before the digital age, law enforcement agencies wanted to know who was checking out what library books. With the advent of the Internet and contextual data, businesses and governments can analyze information about people with little to no effort. Software does the heavy lifting. 

The average person should not be totally put off by data collection. Credit card companies hold far more personalized data than governments and have been doing it far longer. By tracking a customer’s buying habits, these companies can determine if there is suspicious activity and alert them to problems.

The collection and analysis of data is an inevitable situation, as is the shrinking of digital cameras. What one hopes is that over time the citizens who are being protected by these types of services will also have access to them. Imagine a society where citizens have access to the same city-wide camera network that law enforcement uses, or the ability to see who is touching your personal data.