This Prism issue is not a new issue.  Remember William Binney, whistleblower and former NSA crypto-mathematician who served in the agency for decades, said the David Petraeus sex scandal was most likely exposed using illegal surveillance of his email.

Binney came to national attention earlier this year when he started telling the story of how NSA surveillance works to anyone who would listen. He is a crypto-mathematician and a codebreaker of the nth degree (described as one of the best in NSA history) and his explanation of the spying program appeared in the New York Times in August 2012. He spoke about “Stellar Wind” a top-secret domestic spying program developed by the NSA and its implications for civilian security and privacy.

After the entire Petraeus affair scandal, the NSA has come under a bit of a public relations miasma as it pertains to domestic spying and the privacy of US citizens and their digital dealings. It’s important that everyone is already aware that most anything sent over the Internet can be intercepted and anything sent in the clear is largely unprotected; but the scale of surveillance of any individual citizen has always been something of a technical conundrum.

The Prism NSA conversation is not a Silicon Valley issue but a broader policy challenge.  Technology is moving faster than policy can adjust and it’s the technology community’s responsibility to do the right thing.

As an example pointed out by the Atlantic, Justice Scalia stated earlier this week in his dissent in the DNA case, which found that swabbing an arrestee’s cheek was akin to fingerprinting and photographing, and thus “a legitimate police booking procedure that is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

Massive storage of petabytes and the analytics necessary to process it are not uncommon discussion items here on SiliconANGLE.

Just recently I spoke to a top CIO of a public company and he told me the following: “In 2000 1PB of storage was about $1B. Today you can get 1PB of storage, 2TB of memory and over 200 cores for about $500k; and you can actually process the data. All the mooks on TV – O’Reilly, Krauthammer, et al – complain about our civil liberties. Nonsense. We, the US, need to be the best at this, because this tech is all consumer grade and free open source, i.e. the bad guys have it, too. What a democracy needs to do is control the bureaucrats. Every form of government has a bureaucracy, it’s your control of it that differentiates.”

Watch this video from NSA whistleblower and don’t forget the IRS scandal earlier in the year.  Just earlier this year it was discovered that the IRS targeted political opponents of Obama for IRS audits (shakedown).  Specifically, the Tea Party, pro-life and patriotic educational groups from around the country were targeted and intimidated by the Internal Revenue Service.

Most Americans regardless of party believe political reasons drove the Internal Revenue Service to single out for burdensome and unnecessary scrutiny some conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, according to a CBS News/New York Times poll out Thursday.

It is important for anyone who wants to integrate the speed of innovation with technology and government policy to watch this video.

Big Data can disrupt the government but should not put our liberty and security at risk.  This is the opportunity and challenge.