CIA to Use Amazon Cloud to Run Big Data Intelligence Experiments Bloomberg Government

This analysis was first available to Bloomberg Government subscribers. The Central Intelligence Agency is looking to team up with industry experts to run a series of open-source intelligence projects using its Amazon cloud. The agency released a revised acquisition schedule on May 7 for a project known as Mesa Verde that will test the frontiers of big data and open-source intelligence. The project calls for using the CIA's C2S cloud, built by Amazon Web Services LLC, to pore through thousands of terabytes of data, including data publicly available on the Web, and apply tools such as natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and data visualization to draw conclusions others might have missed. For the three years before October 2017, the CIA's Directorate of Digital Innovation Digital Futures led a series of prototype activities to develop analytics applications for Mesa Verde, capable of techniques ranging from simple search through statistical analysis of massive amounts of data using advanced analytic algorithms, according to documents released by the agency.