Strata Week: Leaked documents, intel committees, definition of data mining, and Accumulo

I was pretty cranky before I spoke with Q Ethan McCallum on the phone today.

I was cranky from absorbing the NSA news dominating many data conversations. There is a lot of yammering going on. Some good. Some super bad. My crankiness dissolved a bit after speaking with Q and other Chicago-based people who are working on positive impact data science projects. You’ll be seeing more from Q and these other data science people within the Strata blog very soon. Utilizing data for positive change makes me happy.

My crankiness also dissolved when I decided to not provide summary points on a few articles covering the latest NSA leaks for the Strata Week element. Instead, I decided to pretend that I was an analyst again and think about the resources that I would have wanted to visit in order to form my own insights and analysis.

Recommended Resources for Analysts

• The Guardian. Interested in reviewing the leaked documents and forming your own insights? The Guardian’s “Read the Documents” section will be very useful.
• U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. There is always more than one side to a story. The latest committee updates are available as well as videos of recent hearings.
• Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Specifically the Federal Agency Data Mining Report and finding out very quickly how the U.S. government defines “data mining”. We should all be aware of this.
• Accumulo. Are you technically-oriented and want to understand more about the database that grew up within the NSA? Then you should look at the Wired coverage on Accumolo for background and then take a look around at the open source project.
• ProPublica. I visit this investigative journalism site often and as a full disclosure, I have also donated personal money to ProPublica.
• Techmeme. While there are a lot of aggregators available, this is my go-to aggregator.

If you have resources that you’d like to recommend, please feel free to include them in the comments.