This book brings together an impressive range of academic and intelligence professional perspectives to interrogate the social, ethical and security upheavals in a world increasingly driven by data. Written in a clear and accessible style, it offers fresh insights to the deep reaching implications of Big Data for communication, privacy and organisational decision-making. It seeks to demystify developments around Big Data before evaluating their current and likely future implications for areas as diverse as corporate innovation, law enforcement, data science, journalism, (...) and food security. The contributors call for a rethinking of the legal, ethical and philosophical frameworks that inform the responsibilities and behaviours of state, corporate, institutional and individual actors in a more networked, data-centric society. In doing so, the book addresses the real world risks, opportunities and potentialities of Big Data. (shrink)

This chapter explores the broader security implications of the Big Data age. To what extent should state agencies make decisions on the basis of no other evidence than algorithmic sorting of messy, raw data? And how do these agencies marry innovation with ethics in order to prevent blowback from the media and public? Michael Mulqueen raises pertinent ethical problems and addresses the need for professional ethics in organisations working on security. It is argued that decisions to deploy Big Data are (...) being made in the absence of any systematic epistemology or methodology to track and manage the influences of human intuition and social processes on that action. (shrink)