Big Data Jews working with the CIA's In-Q-Tel

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Big Data-BI  Jews working with the CIA's In-Q-Tel... keep an eye open... --CSR

Looks like a full blown J-Triber Operation...  
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GET TO KNOW US

Platfora brings together an industry-leading team, the best investors in the business, and partners with a unique perspective. Together we're going to build the next great data franchise.


(J) Team

        Ben Werther

        Ben Werther Founder & CEO

        Harnessing big data is as much about deep server technology as it is a battle to reign in complexity. The status quo is untenable -- brittle infrastructure, impenetrable tools, and lots of user pain. Ben founded Platfora to change this and unify disruptive server technology with superb user experience into a big data platform, for business users, that just works. He is an industry veteran and big data thought leader and was head of products at Greenplum through the EMC acquisition.
   
        Peter Schlampp VP of Product & Marketing

        Peter is passionate about designing products that change the way users live, work, and interact with their world. He experienced first-hand the utility and complexity of big data while building products to secure enterprise networks. Peter has led Product and Marketing teams at Solera Networks, IronPort Systems, and Cisco Systems.
     

        John Schuster VP of Engineering


        John believes that great products result from a perfect combination of art and science. He has led engineering teams who have built products that customers love to use in the storage, networking, security, data integration, mobile, SaaS and cloud technologies. John has held executive and senior management positions at SnapLogic, Cisco, IronPort and Network Appliance.

        John Eshleman Founding VP of Technology

        John has been outrunning Moore's law for the past 13 years building large-scale compute and data processing platforms and systems. He is driven to apply his craft to the next frontier in big data platforms - to make them simple and easy to use. In his work at Greenplum he worked on the core of their massively parallel database engine and subsequently led the company's engineering efforts.

        Mark Fleming Senior Director of Sales

        Mark is dedicated to customer success and committed to delivering them the best solutions so they can outperform in the data deluge. Mark's technology sales career began at Oracle and he was an early member of Apple's enterprise sales organization. Most recently he led regional sales for EMC's entire portfolio of hardware, software, security and services.

    Scott Weiss General Partner - Andreessen Horowitz

    Scott has served as the Vice President and General Manager of the Security & Technology Business Unit at Cisco. Prior to Cisco, Scott co-founded IronPort Systems and established the company as the leader in email security, leading to its successful acquisition by Cisco. Scott has also held executive and management positions at Hotmail and IdeaLabs.

    Mike Speiser Managing Director - Sutter Hill Ventures

    Mike joined Sutter Hill Ventures in 2008 from Yahoo!, through the acquisition of Bix, where he served as CEO. Mike has also served as Vice President and Technical Advisor to Symantec's Chairman & CEO and served as Vice President of Product Marketing and Product Management at VERITAS Software.
 
  Ben Werther Founder & CEO - Platfora

    Harnessing big data is as much about deep server technology as it is a battle to reign in complexity. The status quo is untenable -- brittle infrastructure, impenetrable tools, and lots of user pain. Ben founded Platfora to change this and unify disruptive server technology with superb user experience into a big data platform, for business users, that just works. He is an industry veteran and big data thought leader and was head of products at Greenplum through the EMC acquisition.

Investors

    http://www.platfora.com/wp-content/uplo ... owitz1.png

    Andreessen Horowitz is a stage-agnostic venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth-stage funding to the best new technology companies. Founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz helps entrepreneurs become successful CEOs and build important and enduring companies. Its general partners are Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, John O'Farrell, Scott Weiss, Jeff Jordan and Peter Levine, all widely recognized experts in the creation, scaling and operation of high growth technology companies. The firm has $1.2 billion under management across two funds. Among its 60 investments are Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, Skype, Twitter and Zynga. The firm was established in June 2009 and is located in Menlo Park, California.

    http://www.a16z.com

    http://www.platfora.com/wp-content/uplo ... tures1.png

    Sutter Hill Ventures has financed technology-based start-ups and assisted entrepreneurs in building market-leading companies since 1962. Through our decades of experience, we have developed strong industry networks, considerable operating and venture capital experience, and an understanding of the challenges that early-stage and high-growth companies face. We offer expertise in developing business strategy and partnerships, building management teams, and financing companies in both public and private markets. Once we invest in a company, we bring to bear our time, expertise, and extensive industry networks to help these companies succeed. Building companies is our top priority and our favorite occupation.

    http://www.shv.com

In-Q-Tel is the not-for-profit, strategic investment firm that works to identify, adapt, and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the U.S. Intelligence Community. Launched in 1999 as a private, independent organization, IQT's mission is to identify and partner with companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve the national security interests of the United States.

Advisors

   Prof. Joe Hellerstein  Technical Advisory Board

    Joe Hellerstein is a Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, whose work focuses on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. He is an ACM Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and the recipient of two ACM-SIGMOD "Test of Time" awards for his research. In 2010, Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology , and MIT's Technology Review magazine included his work on Distributed Programming on their 2010 TR10 list of the 10 technologies "most likely to change our world". Key ideas from his research have been incorporated into commercial and open-source software from IBM, Oracle, and PostgreSQL.

   
Luke Wroblewski Design Advisory Board

Luke is a digital product designer and author of several popular books on Web design including Mobile First and Web Form Design. He is Co-founder and former board member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He was Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Bagcheck (acquired by Twitter in 2011), and Chief Design Architect at Yahoo!, where he worked on product alignment and integrated customer experiences on the Web, mobile, TV, and beyond. Prior to this, he held positions as the Lead User Interface Designer of eBay Inc.'s platform team, and as Senior Interface Designer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.


http://www.platfora.com/team/    

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Apache Accumulo™ sorted, distributed key/value store is a robust, scalable, high performance data storage and retrieval system. Apache Accumulo is based on Google's BigTable design and is built on top of Apache Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Thrift. Apache Accumulo features a few novel improvements on the BigTable design in the form of cell-based access control and a server-side programming mechanism that can modify key/value pairs at various points in the data management process. Other notable improvements and feature are outlined here.

Google published the design of BigTable in 2006. Several other open source projects have implemented aspects of this design including HBase, Hypertable, and Cassandra. Accumulo began its development in 2008 and joined the Apache community in 2011.

http://accumulo.apache.org/

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7 Technologies That Will Make It Easier for the Next President to Hunt and Kill You  

By The Staff of Danger Room
November 6, 2012 |
6:30 am



For decades, political scientists have wrung their hands about an "Imperial Presidency," an executive branch with powers far beyond its original, Constitutional limits. This new hardware and software could make the old concerns look more outdated than horses and bayonets, to coin a phrase. Here are seven examples.

Robotic assassination campaigns directed from the Oval Office. Cyber espionage programs launched at the president's behest. Surveillance on an industrial scale. The White House already has an incredible amount of power to monitor and take out individuals around the globe. But a new wave of technologies, just coming online, could give those powers a substantial upgrade. No matter who wins the election on Tuesday, the next president could have an unprecedented ability to monitor and end lives from the Oval Office.

The current crop of sensors, munitions, control algorithms, and data storage facilities have helped make the targeted killing of American adversaries an almost routine affair. Nearly 3,000 people have been slain in the past decade by American drones, for instance. The process will only get easier, as these tools of war become more compact, more powerful, and more precise. And they will: Moore's Law applies in the military and intelligence realms almost as much as it does in the commercial sphere.

For decades, political scientists have wrung their hands about an "Imperial Presidency," an executive branch with powers far beyond its original, Constitutional limits. This new hardware and software could make the old concerns look more outdated than horses and bayonets, to coin a phrase. Here are seven examples.


Drone Autonomy

There's a standard response to skeptics of the killer flying robots known as drones that goes something like this: Every time a drone fires its weapon, a human being within a chain of command (of other human beings) made that call. The robot never decides for itself who lives and who dies. All of that is true. It's just that some technical advances, both current and on the horizon, are going to make it less true.

On one end of the spectrum is the Switchblade, AeroVironment's mashup of drone and missile. Weighing under 6 pounds and transportable in a soldier's backpack, the drone carries a function whereby an operator can pre-program its trajectory using GPS; When it reaches the target, it explodes, without its operator commanding it to. On the other end is the Navy's experimental UCLASS, which by 2019 ought to yield an armed drone with a 62-foot wingspan that can take off and land from an aircraft carrier at the click of a mouse, its flight path selected earlier while Naval aviators go get a snack. The Navy has no plans to let the UCLASS release its weapons except at a human's direction, but its autonomy goes beyond anything the military currently possesses.

All of this stands to change drone warfare — ironically, by changing human behavior. As humans get used to incremental expansions in drone autonomy, they'll expect more functionality to come pre-baked. That might erode the currently-rigid edict that people must conduct the strikes; at a minimum, it will free human operators to focus more of their attention on conducting attacks. The first phase of that challenge has arrived: the Army confirmed this week that a unit in eastern Afghanistan is now using the Switchblade.

— Spencer Ackerman  

Photo: Jared Soares/Wired

'City-Sized' Surveillance

Predator-class drones are today's spy tools of choice; the military and CIA have hundreds of them keeping watch over Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Mexico, and elsewhere. But the Predators and the larger Reapers are imperfect eyes in the sky. They rely on cameras that offer, as the military cliche goes, a "soda straw" view of the battlefield — maybe a square kilometer, depending on how high the drone flies.

Tomorrow's sensors, on the other hand, will be able to monitor an area 10 times larger with twice the resolution. The Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System ("Argus, for short) is a collection of 92 five-megapixel cameras. In a single day, it collects six petabytes of video — the equivalent of 79.8 years' worth of HD video.

Argus and other "Wide Area Airborne Surveillance" systems have their limitations. Right now, the military doesn't have the bandwidth to pull all that video off a drone in real time. Nor it does it have the analysts to watch all the footage; they're barely keeping up with the soda straws. Plus, the camera bundles have had some problems sharing data with some of the military's other spy systems.

But interest in the Wide Area Airborne Surveillance systems is growing — and not just among those looking to spy overseas. The Department of Homeland Security recently put out a call for a camera array that could keep tabs on 10 square kilometers at once, and tested out another WAAS sensor along the border. Meanwhile, Sierra Nevada Corporation, a well-traveled intelligence contractor, is marketing its so-called "Vigilant Stare" sensor (.pdf), which it says will watch "city-sized fields of regard" for domestic "counter-narcotics" and "civil unrest" missions. Keep your eyes peeled.

— Noah Shachtman  

Photo: Darpa


Massive Data Storage

The idea of the government watching your every move is frightening. But not as frightening as the government recording your every move in digital database that never gets full.

This nightmare data storage scenario is closer than you think. A study from the Brookings Institute says that it will soon be within the reach of the government — and other organizations — to keep a digital record everything that everyone in the country says or does, and the NSA is clearly on the cutting edge of large-scale data storage.

The agency is building a massive $2 billion data center in Utah — due to go live in September of next year — and taking a cue from Google, agency engineers have built a massive database platform specifically designed to juggle massive amounts of information.

According to a senior intelligence official cited in Wired's recent feature story on the Utah data center, it will play an important role in new efforts within the agency to break the encryption used by governments, businesses, and individuals to mask their communications.

"This is more than just a data center," said the official, who once worked on the Utah project. Another official cited in the story said that several years ago, the agency made an enormous breakthrough in its ability to crack modern encryption methods.

But equally important is the agency's ability to rapidly process all the information collected in this and other data centers. In recent years, Google has developed new ways of overseeing petabytes of data — aka millions of gigabytes — using tens of thousands of ordinary computer servers. A platform called BigTable, for instance, underpins the index that lets you instantly search the entire web, which now more than 644 million active sites. WIth Accumulo, the NSA has mimicked BigTable's ability to instantly make sense of such enormous amounts of data. The good news is that the NSA's platform is also designed to provide separate security controls from each individual piece of data, but those controls aren't in your hands. They're in the hands of the NSA.

— Cade Metz  

Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired.com

Tiny Bombs and Missiles

Unless you're super strong or don't mind back pain, you can't carry a Hellfire missile. The weapon of choice for drone attacks weighs over 100 pounds, and that's why it takes a 27-foot-long Predator to pack one. But that's all about to change. Raytheon's experimental Small Tactical Munition weighs nearly a tenth of a Hellfire. In May, rival Textron debuted a weapon that loiters in mid-air, BattleHawk, that weighs a mere 5 pounds.

Normally, a smaller bomb or missile just means a smaller smoking crater. But as the weapons get smaller, the number of robots that can carry them increases. The U.S. military has under 200 armed Predators and Reapers. It has thousands of smaller, unarmed spy drones like Pumas and Ravens. Those smaller drones get used by smaller units down on the military's food chain, like battalions and companies; if they get armed, then drone strikes can become as routine as artillery barrages. That's heavy.

— Spencer Ackerman  

Photo: Raytheon

'Tagging and Tracking' Tech

Right before the Taliban executed him for allegedly spying for the Americans in April 2009, 19-year-old Pakistani Habibur Rehman said in a videotaped "confession" that he had been paid to plant tracking devices wrapped in cigarette paper inside Taliban and Al-Qaida safehouses. The devices emitted barely detectable radio signals that allegedly guided U.S. drone strikes.

The CIA has never copped to using such trackers, but U.S. Special Operations Command openly touts its relationship with manufacturers of "tagging, tracking and locating devices." One of these firms, Herndon, Virginia-based Blackbird Technologies, has supplied tens of thousands of these trackers as part of a $450 million contract. The company's 2-inch-wide devices hop between satellite, radio frequencies, CDMA and GSM cellular networks to report the locations of whatever they're attached to.

If SOCOM has its way, these trackers will only be the start. The command has spent millions developing networks of tiny "unattended ground sensors" that can be scattered across a battlefield and spot targets for decades, if its makers are to be believed. SOCOM is also on the hunt for tiny, plantable audio and video recorders and optical and chemical "taggants" that can mark a person without him knowing it. The idea is for spies like Rehman (if that's what he was) to more accurately track militants ... and get away with it.

— David Axe and Noah Shachtman  

Photo: Lockheed Martin


Global Strike

Take the military's current inventory of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can scream toward their targets at speeds of more than 500 miles per hour. Not too shabby. But also positively slow compared to a new generation of experimental hypersonic weapons that may soon travel many times that speed — and which the Pentagon and the Obama administration dreams about one day lobbing at their enemies anywhere on the globe in less than an hour. And don't count on the current president, or perhaps even the next one, on abandoning the project any time soon.

It's called "Prompt Global Strike," and the Defense Department has worked for a decade on how to field such radical weapons with a mix of trial and error. Among them include the shorter-range X-51A Waverider, a scramjet-powered cruise missile hurtled at up to six times the speed of sound. Even more radical is Darpa's pizza-shaped glider named the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, and the Army's pointy-shaped Advanced Hypersonic Weapon — designed to travel at Mach 20 and Mach 8, respectively. If any of these weapons or a variant is ever fielded, they could be used to assassinate a terrorist while on the move or blast a nuclear silo in the opening minutes of a war. Or inadvertently start World War III.

While the Waverider is launched from a plane and resembles a cruise missile (albeit one traveling intensely fast), the HTV-2 is launched using an intercontinental ballistic missile before separating and crashing back down to Earth. But as far as Russian and Chinese radars are concerned, the HTV-2 could very well be an ICBM potentially armed with a nuke and headed for Beijing or Moscow. The Pentagon has apparently considered this doomsday scenario, and has walked back the non-nuke ICBM plan — sort of — while touting a potential future strike weapon launched at the intermediate range from a submarine. But there's also still plenty of testing to do, and a spotty record of failures for the Waverider and the HTV-2. Meanwhile, the Russians are freaked out enough to have started work on a hypersonic weapon of their own.

— Robert Beckhusen

Photo: Air Force

Sensor Fusion

The military can listen in on your phone calls, and can watch you from above. But it doesn't have one thing — one intelligence-collection platform, as the jargon goes — that can do both at once. Instead, the various "ints" are collected and processed separately — and only brought together at the final moment by a team of analysts. It's a gangly, bureaucratic process that often allows prey to slip through the nets of military hunters.

The exception to this is the Blue Devil program. It outfits a single Beechcraft King Air A90 turboprop plane with a wide area sensor, a traditional camera, and eavesdropping gear — all passing information from one to the other. The electronic ear might pick up a phone call, and tell the camera where to point. Or the wide area sensor might see a truck moving, and ask the eavesdropper to take a listen. Flying in Afghanistan since late 2010, the system has been "instrumental in identifying a number of high-value individuals and improvised explosive device emplacements," according to the Air Force, which just handed out another $85 million contract to operate and upgrade the fleet of four Blue Devil planes.

There's a second, more ambitious phase of the Blue Devil program, one that involved putting a lot more sensors onto an airship the size of a football field. But that mega-blimp upgrade never made it to the flight-testing phase, owing to a series of bureaucratic, financial and technical hurdles. But the idea of sensor fusion is not going anywhere. And, let's be honest: If one of these surveillance arrays catches you in their web, neither are you.


-- Noah Shachtman  

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11 ... ewall=true