Report: Google, CIA investing in "Future of Web Monitoring"
Noah Shachtman reports at Wired Danger Room blog that the investment arms of the CIA and Google are together backing a firm that monitors the web in real time, and claims to use that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."The "How People Use It" page on Recorded Future's website makes absolutely no attempt to hide The Creepy:The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.
Research a personExclusive: Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring (Wired Danger Room blog)
Monitor news on public figures to...
Identify future travel plans; spot past travel trends and patterns
Search for communication with other individuals; graph their network
Monitor career history and announced job changes
Find quotations and sound bites in the news and blogs
Discover future and past strategic positioning
Uncover public political ties and family relationships
Video above, a trailer of sorts for "Recorded Future."
14 Comments • Add a comment
Argh, this is terrible. It's probably using some pretty complex Bayesian algorithms or something similar. Math is not magic! Even Bayesian statistics are prone to subjectivity. I can only imagine this is going to end badly.
Luckily, this doesn't synergize at all with the the last couple of presidents' asserted power to declare anyone a terrorist and have them shipped off(to Bagrahm rather than Gitmo, of course, because we are all about change now)...
I'm not too worried about it, the CIA is a bunch of idiots - thugs, really.
What about the new secure search that Google has? Will that be open to the CIA too?
I might have to find another search engine...
I don't think you've read the whole thing.
Google invested in this startup in a funding round that among others included the CIA I can see how that would make a decent link-bait but it's really just corporations investing in some cool technology.
I, for one, welcome our omniscient, fortune-telling overlords.
Minority Report, meet The Matrix. The Matrix, this is my friend Minority Report.
Also, "cool technology?"
Are you kidding me? Of course it will just be used to predict when bunnies are most likely to lay Cadberry eggs. I mean, really, that's all this "cool technology" is about, and obviously why any disinterested, nice "corporation" would spend worthless money on it.
Sorry, your either vastly naive or otherwise intentionally misleading comment was pretty decent troll-bait.
Can we declare Philip K. Dick a prophet yet?
Nice. Now can we use the same tool for tracking links between politicians, bankers, oil barons, drug lords and other organized criminals?
The generic Middle Eastern/Southeast Asian music's a nice touch.
OMG It's 1984 all over again... Police state... I'm moving to Nepal...!
etc.
Check out ixquick. they keep no data.
Advanced forms of social-network analysis look intriguingly like Asimov's psychohistory, for its predictive power within human systems. Seems like this Google venture is an attempt to take that a little further toward Hari Seldon's specialty. What I want to see is this technology and method widely available, however, and not limited to specific power interests.
Assuming your average terrorist spends large amounts of time online, this still won't work.
Good Lord!!! It's a $150/month to get the actual visualizations plus the other bells and whistles!!! I'd be better off taking LSD and reading the e-mails they send rather than fish out that kind of money every month.
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