In this NPR Podcast, the authors of the new book Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda talk about how intelligence agencies have employed new technologies including HPC to fight terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11.
One of the big changes since 9/11 is just not only the volume of information that’s being sucked up by various intelligence platforms – be they satellite and imagery or eavesdropping on communications. But then it’s the ability of supercomputers to crunch all this information in much shorter timeframes to give the operators a chance to then react to this information in a much faster way, so that you – if you pick up information, whether it’s a cell phone conversation, you now have databases that can link those individuals on the cell phone conversations to everyone else they’ve been talking to over a period of months.
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