Accumulo's fine grained access partitioning didn't really take off.  Perhaps it had something to do with the access controls being really hard to provision and dynamically manage?

That's part of it, and part of it is that open source is inherently more customizable:

While Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, insists that Google "is not in cahoots with the NSA," the reality is that everyone in the Hadoop and related open-source communities is. Not by choice or nefarious design, but simply because the open-source community now regularly writes better software than billions of dollars in government money can buy, and agencies like the NSA recognize this.

Dammit, making things open source means people with bad intentions have access to the technology, too.

I guess that's the price of making things free.

tech is just the tool...who wields it and how is important