“We've traced the call… it's coming from inside the house. Now a squad car's coming over there right now, just get out of that house!”

If I even thought about it, I assumed that security and defense contractors had monitoring systems (like in the movies) to prevent a lower level employee such as Edward Snowden from walking away with the family jewels. But if they do, that system isn’t working – turns out ‘the calls’ are coming from inside a broken system.  

Public revelations by Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden about government phone record and data collection may have the security/surveillance-state industrial complex spooked. Booz Allen and businesses like them may be worried that because the information came from one of their own – from inside – their reputations are tarnished beyond polishing, their potential for leaks beyond the power of self-adhesive pipe wraps to prevent.

And now Sphere of Influence of McLean VA, specializing in “big data” and behavioral analysis, is attempting to capitalize on the crisis and fear. Sphere of Influence is a small company (and likely not the only one) looking to get a new piece of a huge pie and hoping their software catches on in the surveillance market.  

Sphere of Influence says cyber security breaches are a red herring – the real threat is “abnormal behavior”

Chris Kauffman, managing partner and director of R&D at Sphere of Influence: “Fundamentally we are talking about abnormal behavior in and among the workforce. The insider threat is an industrial security problem, and detection needs to focus on behavior, not breaches.” The new software will analyze and detect subtle behavioral anomalies and will alert security contractors to possible threats from a company’s own employees.

The number of people now “guarding” secrets and whose “subtle behavioral anomalies” may now be monitored is huge. As of last fall, almost five million people held government security clearances. More than one third of the 1.4 million people with Top Secret clearances are private contractors. And in true MAD Magazine Spy v. Spy style, most of the background checks are done by private contractors.

Most of the news stories about this issue today will probably be about where Edward Snowden is located, and not about the information he made public. Since there is so little talk of reining in or reforming the laws that allow BoozAllen and similar big data gathering missions, maybe Sphere of Influence’s dream of capitalizing on watching the watchers isn’t too outrageous.