Will PRISM Impact Open Data Efforts?

"In recent years, many state and local governments have put effort into open data projects that would inspire developers to create apps and find ways to use public data to bring value to their communities. So news of PRISM, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) online spying tool leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden, angered a lot of people and began a debate about the role of open data. Most people don’t like being spied on, but today the extent of PRISM’s capabilities is cloudy. Some reports say PRISM, which costs $20 million annually to operate, creates a copy of absolutely everything online. Not everyone agrees that this is the case, as it would require cooperation from companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Apple, whose officials have come forward denying cooperation. But others point out that the same law that may require those companies to cooperate with the NSA may prohibit them from coming clean about their involvement. Further confusion is added to the mix by the fact that $20 million is probably nowhere near the amount of funding needed to create a carbon copy of the Internet each year. According to a 2012 infographic created by business intelligence software firm DOMO, every 60 seconds, YouTube users upload 48 hours of video, 571 new websites are created, 3,125 Flickr photos are shared, 100,000 tweets are tweeted, and more than 204 million emails are sent. Multiply those figures by 525,600 (the number of minutes in a non-leap year) and that’s a lot of data to sift through. The federal government doesn’t seem too excited about PRISM becoming public knowledge, but maintains that it’s being used to search for terrorists and spy on other countries, but these explanations leave a lot of questions unanswered. Concerns about constitutional violations persist despite the government's careful phrasing and assurances that PRISM has not been used to spy on citizens willy-nilly, as many reports are suggesting. In fact, the Patriot Act provides that the federal government doesn’t need to disclose the extent of its rights where spying is concerned, let alone the extent of the spying that is actually occurring or how long it has been happening. To summarize, it’s known that PRISM is an Internet spying device, but who is being spied on, which organizations are involved and how it all works is largely a matter of conjecture at this point. Some state and local government leaders are just hoping that this news doesn’t sour people on the idea of open data and the positive things it can do ... The idea that open data and spying are two sides of the same coin, an argument Headd has heard since the PRISM news broke, is ridiculous, he said. 'The open data initiative has its foundation in transparency,' he said. The whole point of open data is to make government more transparent and more accountable, while PRISM wasn’t meant to become public at all. The intentions behind NSA spying and a city looking for a way to turn water usage data into an app aren’t similar ..."