The disclosure that the U.S. government tracks phone call patterns and a broad spectrum of data from large consumer-facing tech companies, which probably include Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO), may cost a huge amount of money to retool so the methods used are not as obvious as they have become because of the disclosures.

The government has stated that the system looks at such a huge volume of data that individual privacy rights are not compromised. But disclosure of the system detail itself my let those who it intends to track more wary about how they communicate. It may give them a working road map to avoid detection, at least by the program as it is constituted now.

The Wall Street Journal says of the NSA data dragnet:

The NSA’s advances have come in the form of programs developed on the West Coast — a central one was known by the quirky name Hadoop — that enable intelligence agencies to cheaply amplify computing power, U.S. and industry officials said. The new capabilities allowed officials to shift from being overwhelmed by data to being able to make sense of large chunks of it to predict events.

Some of those “being watched” may have sophisticated enough software experts to look at Hadoop’s underlying methods and set their own programs to block it. In a world in which sophisticated hackers can decode and undermine almost any well-designed system, Hadoop is no exception.

Now that those who know Hadoop is meant to thwart them can begin to cloak themselves, the federal government must take immense measures quickly to can the operations of the software, which it may not be able to do. If it can accomplish the task, the investment to do so likely will be huge.

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