Hadoop

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Discussion

Snooping with Hadoop

ANDREW LEONARD:

"On June 9, the Wall Street Journal reported that for the last few years the National Security Agency has been relying on a software program “with the quirky name Hadoop” to help it make sense of its enormous collections of data. Named after a toy elephant that belonged to the child of one of the original developers of the program, “Hadoop,” reported the Journal, is a crucial part of “a computing and software revolution … a piece of free software that lets users distribute big-data projects across hundreds or thousands of computers.”

“Revolution” is probably the most overused word in the chronicle of Internet history, but if anything, the Wall Street Journal undersold the real story. Hadoop’s importance to how we live our lives today is hard to overstate. By making it economically feasible to extract meaning from the massive streams of data that increasingly define our online existence, Hadoop effectively enabled the surveillance state.

And not just in the narrowest, Big Brother, government-is-watching-everyone-all-the-time sense of that term. Hadoop is equally critical to private sector corporate surveillance. Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Netflix — just about every big player that gathers the trillions of data “events” generated by our everyday online actions employs Hadoop as a part of their arsenal of Big Data-crunching tools. Hadoop is everywhere — as one programmer told me, “it’s taken over the world.”

The Journal’s description of Hadoop as “a piece of free software” barely scratches the surface of the significance of this particular batch of code. In the past half-decade Hadoop has emerged as one of the triumphs of the non-proprietary, open-source software programming methodology that previously gave us the Apache Web server, the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser. Hadoop belongs to nobody. Anyone can copy it, modify, extend it as they please. Funny, that: A software program developed collaboratively by programmers who believe that their code should be shared in as open and transparent a process as possible has resulted in the creation of tools that everyone from the NSA to Facebook uses to annihilate any semblance of individual privacy. But what’s even more ironic, and fascinating, is the sight of intelligence agencies like the NSA and CIA joining in and becoming integral players in the world of open source big data software. The NSA doesn’t just use Hadoop. NSA programmers have improved and extended Hadoop and donated their changes and additions back to the larger community. The CIA actively invests in start-ups that are commercializing Hadoop and other open source projects." (http://www.salon.com/2013/06/14/netflix_facebook_and_the_nsa_theyre_all_in_it_together/)