Oh hey, the National Security Agency (NSA) is snooping around all of your financial information too. Or are they? We already knew they could read your e-mail and listen to your phone calls, but according to the German magazine Spiegel, citing new details from the Edward Snowden files, reported yesterday that an NSA program called Follow the Money tracks records of international payments, banking, and credit-card transactions.

But wait, not so fast, says SiliconANGLE’s own Mike Wheatley. The NSA storyline is one that has a lot of scare tactics involved, but that’s not equivalent to topic being covered being a confirmed illegal action. Here is an excerpt from Mike’s piece, So The NSA “Follow’s The Money”, Who Cares? It’s Not News, yesterday:

The likelihood is that much of this ‘spying’ is totally legal and above board, and we should also note that it’s almost exclusively focused on transactions carried out by foreigners, not US citizens, and so it’s not subject to domestic banking privacy laws. If the NSA was spying on domestic Visa and SWIFT transactions that would be something different, but it isn’t. Moreover, the US even has an agreement with the EU that such monitoring is acceptable, which rules out any of our most important allies’ objections to the program.

Can Nate Silver’s vision of Data Culture save us?

 
I think I know what we need. We need Nate Silver. The data-modeling genius had a busy week last week. He first gave a keynote at the Tableau Customer Conference in Washington D.C., where he spoke on how the volume of data does not trump the modeling of data. Big Data does not stand for “the more the merrier.” The most interesting part of his keynote is the “good data analysis” equation. Silver says that there is a third factor: volume + modeling + culture = good data analysis.

Most would consider that alone a busy enough week, but Silver wasn’t finished. He then locked horns with Public Policy Polling, an automated polling service. From the Washington Post story that broke late last week, at the heart of the issue was the Democratic pollster’s decision, disclosed Wednesday, not to publish the results of a poll on the Colorado state Senate recalls that the firm did not believe to be accurate. The poll showed state Sen. Angela Giron losing by 12 points in a strongly Democratic district. Which is the exact margin that she lost by on Tuesday.

VERY bad and unscientific practice for @ppppolls to suppress a polling result they didn’t believe/didn’t like. http://t.co/tOp5PhUbnf

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) September 11, 2013

@ThePlumLineGS @ppppolls: But I’m especially skeptical when a pollster puts its finger on the scale in a way that matches its partisan views

— Nate Silver (@fivethirtyeight) September 11, 2013

At the crux of Silver’s issue with the PPP seems to be the accountability, or “culture,” relative to polling data, what the public sees, and what (if at all) polling services choose to let the public see. Nate Silver gained cult-like status when he accurately predicted the outcome all 50 states in the 2012 election, correctly surmising that President Obama would win.

Watch Silver’s most recent time on #theCUBE at the Tableau Customer Conference 2013 as he discusses data culture and more.

 
As we take a step back and look at it from a 10,000 foot view. Nate Silver is a guy that knows his data, and has figured out a pretty good modeling algorithm for predictive outcomes. But the “whats” and the “whys” are the most interesting parts of those modeling methods. In a sector of Big Data (analysis and modeling) he seems to represent everything that is the opposite of manipulating data. “You need volume of data, you need high quality data, you need a culture that actually has the right incentives aligned, where you really do want to find a way to build a better product to make more money,” said Silver.