NSA Spying Aided by Open-Source Software
Newsmax

The National Security Agency has been using the top-secret program called PRISM to monitor online activity by accessing the servers of Internet companies.

The software the NSA uses is anything but top secret, however. The agency relies to an extent on open-source software — which makes the collection of computer instructions known as source code available to the general public with relaxed or nonexistent copyright restrictions.

"In this era of open-source software, the NSA gets direct access to the inventions of thousands of the smartest computer-science minds on the planet for free," Bloomberg Businessweek reports in an article headlined "Spies Like Us: How We All Helped Build PRISM."

Google created its own open-source software programs to collect and analyze data, and Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo! were among those that followed suit.

The NSA disclosed in 2009 that it was building a system based on Hadoop, a data processing software program that Google and Yahoo! had popularized, and set up its own open-source data mining project called Accumulo.

"Among the citizen coders who've contributed to the NSA effort are employees of Silicon Valley startups, cybersecurity firms, and federal contractors (you guessed it: Booz Allen Hamilton)," Businessweek disclosed.

Edward Snowden, who leaked information about the NSA's electronic surveillance program, worked for the technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

The article concludes: "When you hear about the NSA sucking up petabytes of information every hour, you can be sure that programs developed by your favorite Web companies are helping to power the effort."