Silicon Valley and spy agency bound by strengthening web

When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook's more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyses large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Kelly's move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyse and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

The only difference is that the NSA does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The disclosure of the spy agency's programme called Prism, which is said to collect the emails and other web activity of foreigners using major internet companies like Google, Yahoo! and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret NSA court orders for specific data.

Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the NSA and the rise of data mining - both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool - have created a more complex reality.

Silicon Valley has what the spy agency wants: vast amounts of private data and the most sophisticated software available to analyse it. The agency in turn is one of Silicon Valley's largest customers for what is known as data analytics, one of the valley's fastest-growing markets. To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, United States intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Kelly.

"We are all in these Big Data business models," said Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation Research, based in San Francisco. "There are a lot of connections now because the data scientists and the folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests."

Although Silicon Valley has sold equipment to the NSA and other intelligence agencies for a generation, the interests of the two began to converge in new ways in the last few years as advances in computer storage technology drastically reduced the costs of storing enormous amounts of data - at the same time that the value of the data for use in consumer marketing began to rise.

© 2013 The New York Times News Service