That article isn’t a defense of PRISM at all, it’s a plea to not judge big data itself as the enemy. Big data is just a description of a broad range of data storage and analysis techniques that only become useful or necessary when you’re dealing with huge amounts of data. It’s just a tool, and right now the NSA is using that tool to aggregate information about people all over the world and analyze it for connections. This is not about the technology they’re using, it’s about what they’re doing.
