Data are a defining feature of modern society. Every day, humans and the machines they interact with create 2.5 trillion megabytes of data. As data become more prominent and readily available, the temptation to analyze them and make sense of the world through specific analytics methods or algorithms grows.
This is particularly true for national security. Big data is a “big deal” for U.S. spy agencies, which have long relied on multiple data sources to produce intelligence reports. In the past decade, agencies like the CIA and the NSA have institutionalized big data through the development of dedicated analytics units and research and development projects focusing on the analysis of online data such as YouTube videos and social media posts.
By Dr Savitri Vishwanathan
By Shashank Yadav
By K.N. Pandita
DANIEL MARKEY
By Audrey Gaughran
JOYEETA BHATTACHARJEE
The idea that China holds the key to solving the ongoing political and military crisis on the Korean Peninsula has been the standard jack-in-the-box of U.S. North Korea policy for the past seven decades, set to pop up whenever U.S.-North Korea tensions escalated and the threat of war thought imminent.
For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places such as Cuba or Vietnam without having their system of global hegemony, backed by the world’s wealthiest economy and finest military, affected.
A new nuclear state, in a major crisis with a conventionally superior nuclear-armed adversary, contemplates and prepares to move nuclear assets in the event it has to use them. Who controls the nuclear forces? Who decides when they might be assembled, mated to delivery vehicles, moved, and launched? Who has nominal authority to order those decisions? Who has the physical ability to implement them even without proper authorization? How experienced are the relevant units in these operations? What could go wrong?
To qualify as colonial powers, Facebook and Google must effectively limit the choices and power of users, and punish or coerce those who question or resist their power.
