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Data Leaks Like Oil, So Good Thing Booz Allen's VP Was the Chief of the BP Spill Response

When data leaks like oil ... Thad Allen, the "National Incident Commander" during the BP spill, now has another leak on his hands. And oil has more in common with data than you think.
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Executive Vice President Thad Allen is the author of the last blog post on Booz Allen Hamilton's website before company employee Edward Snowden unloaded one of the biggest trove of state secrets in history. He was also an admiral in the US Coast Guard during 2010's BP Gulf spill, and Obama appointed him the "National Incident Commander."

So that means Mr. Allen has been uniquely responsible for cleaning up two of the nation's biggest leaks in the last three years.

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In that blog post, which is about "enterprise leadership" and the need to facilitate cooperation between private and governmental institutions, Allen discusses how his role in responding to the BP Gulf spill has primed him to tackle homeland and cyber security issues:

Using systems thinking during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response, we realized that we weren’t just dealing with a monolithic oil spill of historic proportions. … Unlike during Katrina, it was the government’s responsibility to lead the overall response enterprise, which included understanding the role of the private sector and the needs of the affected communities.

As National Incident Commander, I had to view the response from the outside as a complex enterprise to completely understand it. Lessons learned from the Haiti earthquake helped me connect the dots and make the recommendation to take control of the airspace over the Gulf to reduce the chance of air collisions and improve surveillance.

Initially, I just thought it was a little funny that data leaks and oil spills were described in much the same terminology, and that a single DC bigwig was involved in two of the biggest. But the events have a few parallels that are worth considering. In both cases, data and oil leaked much the same way—explosively, and from a single source. In both cases, the substance concerned is a valuable commodity that both corporations and the government are complicit in mismanaging.

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Each leak raised questions about the ethics of the opaque union of government agencies and the involved corporations. To a degree, each spill revealed a too-cozy relationship between the two: The Mineral Management Service doled out permits like candy and regulators golfed with oil execs, while the NSA handed our personal data over to third-party contractors like Booz.

In both cases, the institutional response was ultimately about keeping a volatile substance contained. Both by managing public relations—the government goes on the defensive, and the corporations clam up—and working to plug the actual leak.

Just for fun, let's try a little exercise. Here's an April 2011 TIME interview with Thad Allen—who by all counts was a good Incident Commander—conducted after the spill had been stopped. But replace each use of the word "oil" with "data" in each of Allen's responses, and you get the following:

–"We did not know then the full impact of the [data] spill or the results, but we knew then it would be a catastrophic event."

–"All our spill response and the regulatory regime was focused on trying to protect the [data] being transferred, but in the meantime, the industry moved offshore and went way deep under a different set of rules and regulations. We had a disconnect on how that was maintained."

–"First of all, the means of production to do [data] exploration globally lies with the private sector, not the government. We often asked [ourselves] whether we might be able to find that capability elsewhere, and the answer was no."

You get the point. This comparison is obviously a pretty limited one. But the incidents each nonetheless highlight how big (yes, even "monolithic") institutions are managing vital, pervasive, and potentially dangerous commodities that are central to our daily lives. After all, our data, like pelican-killing oil, is everywhere. Even when it's not in the news.