Mark Testoni, John Poindexter: Data Access Rules, Privacy Concerns Pose Challenge to Predictive Analytics Use

Mark Testoni, president and CEO of SAP National Security Services, has said various data access and sharing rules have posed a challenge to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies that seek to gain insights from big data to help predict terrorist attacks and other crimes, Bloomberg reported Thursday. 

Chris Strohm writes Testoni told the publication that law enforcement authorities’ need for a court warrant to gain access to information is one example.

John Poindexter, a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and a member of the board of directors at Saffron Technology, said intelligence agencies that aim to predict terrorist attacks should build a system that works to collect and analyze a wide range of data from various sources and has privacy protection features, Strohm reports.

“The government’s priorities should be to solve the privacy issue and start ingesting massive amounts of data into memory bases,” said Poindexter, who developed the “Total Information Awareness” program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2002.

“You have to get the public on board with the idea that we can collect and search information on terrorist planning that doesn’t have an adverse impact on innocent people,” he added, according to the report.