When I read
the recent revelations in the press about whistleblower Edward Snowden and the
NSA’s mass surveillance and storage of day to day emails, phone calls and
web searches, it struck me that the technology required to store and profile
such huge volumes of data is perhaps not so earth shatteringly advanced.
Are the government’s technological capabilities really all that
different from what can be already be achieved in most manufacturing
environments by using simple SCADA and a data historian?
William
Binney, former NSA crypto-mathematician, claims that the NSA collects call
records at a rate of 3 billion per day. He alleges that the US government
is building a big data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah that will have 5
zettabytes of storage capability, enough to specifically meet these
needs. Indeed he states that this is space enough for 500 years’ worth of
the world’s communications! OK, I know we don’t generally
need that much data storage in the manufacturing world, but the numbers
in our industrial environment, although smaller, are still mind boggling.
Your average manufacturing site easily collects 75 million data points every
day and requires data storage over many years.
The US
government is alleged to have the capability to do individualized searches for
particular electronic communications in real time via selection criteria.
They can also watch-list names and key words in emails. Of course they
will struggle to look at every individual piece of communication, but they can
look for patterns, signatures and profiles which, once spotted, alert them to
drill down into the detail. Isn't this a bit like what we do in
manufacturing?
We use SCADA systems and data intelligence tools to alert
us to when a manufacturing line or industrial plant might be trending off
specification. Operators can then drill down into the data to
troubleshoot or carry out route cause analysis. Manufacturing data tends
to be structured and time sequenced, which makes analysis fairly
straightforward. But with the rise of disparate data sources and the use of
search engine based technologies to interrogate unstructured data (a la
Google), dash board style mash ups are becoming increasingly available.
It will not be long before this same sort of technology is used in all sorts of
industrial and commercial applications to improve our day to day experience.
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| Written by Sue Roche, Business Unit Manager, Software SolutionsPT |
As this
blog goes out into the ether it may well be recorded and stored and become part
of a pattern that warrants further investigation by government forces or
whomever else might be interested. Whether the current privacy debate
forces any significant change in government policy remains to be seen,
but one thing is certain, the technology will continue to develop and expand
into a wide range of business and industrial applications.
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