The Google Clones That Power NSA Surveillance | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

This sensationalized snapshot obscures a broader reality: most key technologies in the big data wave are based on open source projects inspired by Google research publications

"What’s more, the agency has built its own Google clone: a massively distributed databased called Accumulo. Like Hadoop, Accumulo was based on a research paper published by Google, a paper describing a sweeping database called BigTable. There are several other BigTable clones out there, such as Cassandra and Hbase, and the NSA’s decision to build its own tool rather than use something that already existed got the agency into some hot water with Congress, as we reported last year. But it had good reason: It wanted tighter security controls."

The Google Clones That Power NSA Surveillance | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com