After the NSA gave its storage software - Accumulo - to the Apache Foundation, some of its software engineers left to form sqrrl and have attracted venture capital to commercialize this taxpayer-funded system. See my full article here: http://cctvcambridge.org/sqrrl

1. Accumulo: The NSA's Open Source Storage Solution
Saul Tannenbaum, NeighborMedia
saultannenbaum.org
@stannenb
NSA's Utah Data Center,
courtesy Swilsonmc

2. The NSA and Open Source have a
history

3. Continued Collaboration
Morning Keynote Speaker (confirmed):
Dr. Patrick Dowd is the National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS)’s Chief Technical Officer and also serves as Chief Architect. He
recently transitioned to this role after serving as Deputy Director of Mission Capabilities within the Technology Directorate of the National Security
Agency.
Dr. Dowd joined the Research Directorate of NSA in 1996, and is co-founder of the Laboratory for Telecommunications Science (R4). He moved from
Research to the SIGINT Directorate in 2004, where he directed projects to unify Computer Network Operations (CNO) and developed technical
strategies to integrate CNO, SIGINT, and Defense. He then became the Deputy Directorate for Modernization within the Information Technology
Directorate in 2006 to execute his work and build out the world-wide operational environment of NSA at scale.
http://oss-institute.org/component/events/event/47

4. From Edward Snowden and The
Guardian, we know some of what they
deploy

5. NSA uses FOSS software for the same
reasons we do
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/08/
nsa-boundless-informant-data-mining-slides

6. The NSA's Big Data Problem
● Storing all our telephone metadata and internet
transactions is a serious technical challenge
● Searching it is even harder
● Google solved this with “Big Table” which it
publicly described in 2006
– Inspired a number of other implementations of similar
massively scaleable data stores
● None had the security features the NSA needed

7. The NSA's Big Data Solution
(http://c4i.gmu.edu/events/reviews/2013/pdfs/AFCEA2013-Kahn.pdf)

8. The NSA's Big Data Solution
● NSA creates “Accumulo” in 2008
– Adds cell level security and real time, server-side
computation to typical big data feature set
● NSA offers it to the Apache Foundation in 2011 as
an incubator project
● Apache promotes it to top level project in 2012
● NSAAccumulo technical staff leave government to
form sqrrl
● sqrrl receives $2 million venture funding, moves to
Cambridge, ships Sqrrl Enterprise, a commercial
version of Accumulo

9. Sqrrl Use Cases
(http://c4i.gmu.edu/events/reviews/2013/pdfs/AFCEA2013-Kahn.pdf)

10. Intelligence AnalysisIntelligence Analysis: Apache Accumulo was born at NSA within the U.S. Intelligence Community. While we can't say much about how NSA currently uses Accumulo due
to classification reasons, Accumulo was designed to help the Intelligence Community take advantage of the massive amounts of structured, semi-structured, and
unstructured information available to it, while adhering to the strictest of security and privacy requirements.
http://www.sqrrl.com/solutions#government
Sqrrl Whiteboard Video Transcript: NSA Lessons Learned
“Those are the four basic lessons learned over my decade of experience at NSA. We follow through here. We
start small, but design for scale. Iterative schema refinement. Discovery analytics as big app building blocks,
and datacentric security throughout.”
http://blog.sqrrl.com/post/56965175259/sqrrl-whiteboard-video-transcript-nsa-lessons-learned

11. Accumulo: The NSA's Open Source
Storage Solution
Read more at: http://cctvcambridge.org/sqrrl
Saul Tannenbaum
@stannenb
saul@tannenbaum.org
saultannenbaum.org