Patrick Eddington:

In 2011, a VIPR team took over the Amtrak station in Savannah, Georgia and conducted warrantless searches of detraining passengers. Over the last decade, VIPR teams have conducted thousands of such searches (according to Congressional testimony by TSA officials) and uncovered no terrorists.

PCLOB:

The Administration has not yet developed, as the Board recommended, a methodology for gauging the value of its counterterrorism programs.

David Sanger:

The president was vague about the specifics.

Benedict Evans:

Is the big data dividend worth the privacy implications? Is it better to let Google know when you flush the loo for what it can tell you about your bowels, or would people really rather not?

A contrarian's tweet:

Big Data, n.: the belief that any sufficiently large pile of s—-- contains a pony.

Nathan Jurgenson:

The data is big enough to entertain any story.

Konstantin Kakaes:

The central claim of data proponents is that data always has some positive value. This premise is false. Data-gathering that seems innocuous enough to the managerial class often brings with it undue burden on the subjects of the data gathering. Many important questions are simply not amenable to quantitative analysis, and never will be. By laundering their biases and preconceptions into the methodology they use to devise quantitative metrics, policymakers and social scientists can fool themselves and others into believing they are impartial and unbiased.

Unless the evangelists of evidence are resisted, they will steamroll over what they cannot measure, leaving us poorer as individuals and as a society, buried in a bureaucracy of numbers untethered from reality.

Evgeny Morozov:

Technology companies, having grabbed one of the most precious contemporary resources -- data -- now have the leverage over cash-strapped and unimaginative governments, pitching themselves as inevitable, benevolent saviours to the dull bureaucrats inside city administrations.

Thomas Fox-Brewster:

Amid calls from heads of state to allow intelligence agencies access to all private communications, Adam Ghetti the younger has launched a business, Ionic Security in Atlanta, that he hopes will make spies' intrusions into digital lives a near impossibility and data theft "irrelevant."