There Is A Race Between Global Superpowers To Build Data Centers

Zero Hedge: The CIA Sure Looks Busy 

 The rise of generative AI applications like ChatGPT, Midjourney or Bard already leads to increased demand in the world's data center network due to its sometimes hefty requirements for the underlying large language models. 

This computing demand will only increase in the upcoming years, necessitating the building of new data centers and expanding the capacities of existing ones. As Statista's Florian Zandt shows in the following chart, based on 2022 data collected by commercial real estate company Cushman & Wakefield, the race between the global superpowers China and the United States also extends to data centers.  

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WNU Editor: At the beginning of the year I was asked the question on where should someone invest their money. I said that with the explosion of artificial intelligence, you will need massive data centers to accommodate this demand. I specifically pointed out Rexel, Avnet, Sonepar, Microsoft, Amazon, and L3 as good investments. I must confess that I was lucky with my advice. I never calculated the huge impact that intelligence agencies would have on data.

Software That Is Challenging The Intelligence Community

This Peter Thiel Company Is Ripping The Army Intelligence Community Apart -- Business Insider

Palantir is a company founded by Peter Thiel — of Paypal and Facebook renown — that has software which absolutely changes the game with intelligence.

It's one of the best programs at coordinating the vast databases accumulated by the U.S. intelligence apparatus. It's already in use in federal domestic security.

But it's also caused a massive fight inside the Army intelligence command.

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My Comment: This sounds like a more modern and sophisticated version of Able Danger Program. But Palantir has been around for a while .... I first talked about them in 2009.

Data Mining For Terrorists

Photo from BGNetworks

Study of Data Mining for Terrorists Is Urged -- New York Times

WASHINGTON — A federal panel of policy makers and scientific experts urged a government-wide evaluation Tuesday of programs that sift through databases looking for clues on terrorism, to determine whether the programs are effective and legal.

The federal government has made aggressive use of so-called data-mining tools since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as counterterrorism officials in many intelligence agencies have sought to analyze records on travel habits, calling patterns, e-mail use, financial transactions and other data to pinpoint possible terrorist activity.

The National Security Agency’s program for wiretapping terror suspects without warrants, the screening of suspicious airline passengers and the Pentagon’s ill-fated Total Information Awareness program, shut down by Congress in 2003 because of privacy concerns, have all relied on aspects of data mining.

But in a 352-page government study released on Tuesday, a committee of the National Research Council warned that successfully using these tools to deter terrorism “will be extremely difficult to achieve” because of legal, technological and logistical problems. It said a haphazard approach to using such tools threatened both Americans’ privacy rights and the country’s legitimate national security needs.

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My Comment: In a previous post, i commented that data-mining was incredibly effective in Iraq. There should be more study to see if it can be effective against international terror groups.

Hunting For Terrorists

(Cartoon from Cox and Forkum)

Scientists Question Terrorist-Hunting Techniques -- CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two methods the federal government wants to use to find terrorists -- "data mining" and "behavior detection" -- are dubious scientifically and have "enormous potential" for infringing on law-abiding Americans' privacy, a consortium of scientists said.

Data mining involves searching databases for suspicious and revealing relationships and patterns. But while the technique is useful in commercial settings to detect credit card fraud, it is questionable whether data mining can detect and pre-empt terrorist attacks, the National Research Council said.

Behavior detection, used by the Transportation Security Administration and some police departments to isolate possible criminals from crowds, likewise falls short of meeting scientific standards, the group said.

"There is not a consensus within the relevant scientific community" that behavior detection is "ready for use ... given the present state of the science," the group said.

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My Comment: I know that data-mining has been incredibly successful in Iraq. I would love to read the counter-arguments to this report. I will update in the next few days.