How the NSA Could Get So Smart So Fast

Modern Computing Is Helping Companies and Governments Accurately Parse Vast Amounts of Data in a Matter of Minutes

Updated June 12, 2013 7:51 p.m. ET

Five years ago it would have been unimaginable for a government agency such as the National Security Agency to efficiently parse millions of phone, text and online conversations for keywords that could have warned of an impending terrorist attack. Today, a set of new technologies make it relatively affordable and manageable for it do so.

These technologies can store vastly different types of data in a single database, and can be processed rapidly using inexpensive hardware, without an analyst having to formulate a...

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