Over lunch recently, a former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security asked me, “How long do you think it will be until mobile credentials fully replace plastic badges and cards?”

Social spaces will be able to identify and know their inhabitants, visitors, guests, caretakers, administrators, and any other people who interact with them. This knowledge is a fundamental building block because social relationships are built on the concept of stable personal identity over time.

Recently, there was a mall shooting in which three people died about five miles from my home in Columbia, MD. My wife and I were to have been there getting her phone fixed in the exact part of the mall where the killings took place.

As interesting as Big Data can be for finding patterns in the past, its biggest promise for security lies in being able to predict the future.

In the first part of this series (published in April 2013) we discussed some of the major technologies that will play a role in the application of Big Data to the practice of physical security.

 As the Big Data enterprise begins to produce more “answers,” it is important that we not accept context-free results. This is where norms come in.