NSA open source database draws Senate's wrath
- By Defense Systems Staff
- Jul 19, 2012
Lawmakers are questioning in a recently introduced bill whether a massive National Security Agency database modeled on Google's BigTable is in conflict with a government policy preventing federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives, reports Wired.
NSA software coders closely followed Google research paper describing BigTable — the gigantic database that supported many of the Google’s online services, operating across tens of thousands of computer servers -- when they tackled the reverse engineering project in 2008, the story said.
In September 2011, NSA published the open source code of its Google mimic, calling it Accumulo. The Senate Armed Services Committee then took action to thwart the project.
The pending legislation would ban the Defense Department from using the NSA’s database, and it also might force the NSA to meld the project’s security tools with other open source projects that mimic Google’s BigTable.