Martyn Richard Jones
Langley, 2nd September 2016
Few outside of the big intelligence agencies of the USA, Russia and Andorra know this, but a big part of the success of Operational Excellence at ISIS can be put down down to their judicious use of Big Data and Data Science. Or, so say the experts[i].
This will probably come as no surprise to big-gun Big Data gurus such as Bernard Marr, Rab C. Nesbitt or Alan Latchley, or indeed will it appear unusual to the more peripheral and intellectual areas of Big Data ‘guruship’ and Data Scientology, where we may find the likes of Shapiro, Kobielus and Podge and Rodge O’Leprosy.
For years now, big-data-botherers have been banging on about the universal applicability of Big Data, so much so, that it now seems quite churlish to have once assumed that the world’s most sought after head-chopping, body-crushing and prisoner-raping terrorists wouldn’t want to get in on the act.
Asked how they came to use Big Data, we were told via an interpreter that ISIS wanted to become big in the fields of Anti-Heretical Big Data and the Islamisation of Data Scientology. Apparently, they had discounted Data Warehousing and Statistics on the ground that these were the works of the devil, and must be sledgehammered to dust at the earliest possible opportunity and in the worst possible taste. But, they couldn’t decide whether to blame Bill or Ralph for the heresy, and the whole thing was dropped, like a cat with the rabies, when it turned into a something of a Data Warehouse based battle-of-the-religious-dogmas.
We had an open and frank discussion about how Hadoop, Spark, Python, Map R and many other Big Data related technologies and topics could be of assistance in the mother of all meta-Jihads. Big Data technologies and techniques, which we were assured were related in clear and precise ways to the underlying philosophy of ‘death to everything Western’[ii].
However, when we pressed the ISIS spokesman and his team to be more open and frank about their Big Data success stories, they suddenly became very cagey. The spokesman, a tall and lean man in a fetching uniform – undoubtedly a Hugo Boss model especially designed for the ME – stood up and said, very directly, and very firmly “Look, my friend. If we told all the world what we are doing with Big Data, and how we are benefitting from it, and how we massage it, and visualise it, and treat it, then all our rivals would want to copy us. No doubt about it! Which would then leave us without any competitive edge – in our market space.” He paused for a moment, and then continued “What if this fell into the wrong hands. What if, for example, something terrible happened and this technology that we have so carefully protected, nurtured and refined, fell into the hands of… Jeremy Corbyn?”
The mediator piped up “The meeting is now terminated. Thank you, Gentleman, but we really must daesh.”
Surprised? Disgusted? Shocked?
You damn well should be! Because this is precisely the level of Big Data marketing flim-flam that is turned out on almost a daily basis by the biggest bunch of bullshit artists this side of the Mississippi.
As for terrorists using Big Data?
If they are, they will be more royally screwed than by anything Obama or Hillary could possibly throw at them, short of a nuclear strike.
Thanks for reading. Thanks for thinking, critically.
[i] Anonymous experts closely linked to the mainstream media (MSM) – whatever that is
[ii] Except Metallica and Queen
GOOD STRATEGY 