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Raytheon's Riot Program Mines Social Network Data For Intelligence Agencies
Shipud writes "Raytheon has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites according to The Guardian. An 'extreme-scale analytics' system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defense contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Raytheon says it has not sold the software — named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology — to any clients. But the company has acknowledged the technology was shared with U.S. government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analyzing 'trillions of entities' from cyberspace. The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns."
And did they just raid facebook's data, disregarding privacy settings, to develop this software?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
There seem to be eve- more compelling reasons not to use the social networks.
people singular or people en mass? Calculating statistically what a group might do might work but an individual that is a big ask)
Just don't post location data or activities if you're engaging in protests... disable location services on your phone. You're giving data to a public database and then crying about privacy... just don't give them information.
Mark Anthony Collins
We're not supposed to fear our government. We're just crazies and whackos.
Anyone remember the RPG Paranoia? .gov wants you to be happy...
This is another reason why I deleted my FaceBook account. Truth be told, I do not miss it one bit. Try it... you'll feel better.
Anybody else get a flashback to 'Minority Report'?
The raging paranoid in me says this is a Very Bad Thing that will end up with politicians refusing to relinquish power by passing laws arresting people for 'crimes' they might commit based on this statistical analysis, followed up by lists of new 'crimes' demanding 'harsh penalties' covered by these same new laws. Aggrivated littering and felony loitering, anyone?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
In Soviet Russia .....
No, sorry. I've got nothing to top this.
Have gnu, will travel.
tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior
Time for a forest and tree analogy. On a rounding basis, the masses have historically never done anything terribly exciting, important, or relevant. So paying intense attention to them is a waste of resources. Its always the 10% or less who actually influence history. If we made all predictions based on the median joe 6 pack couch potato, we'd still be british subjects, we'd still be in control of independent south vietnam, iraq and afghanistan would be fully pacified, blah blah blah.
I don't think that knowing 30% of the population liked the most recent american idol episode is actionable intelligence information in either the short, medium, or long term. Imagine a squad about to deploy on a mission in Iraq being told that the best help intel can provide today is that 15% of active facebook users like listening to Bieber. Umm, thanks guys, on to the next briefing.
Its a self blinding technology, not an enlightening technology. I'm sure its highly profitable for contractors of course.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
You know, for such an Orwellian sounding program, you'd think the marketing droids there would have picked a better acronym than RIOT. Like Worldwide Online Overlord Technology or something on the lines of that.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
I pretty much do the same things every day at more or less the same time. I have Sunday dinner at the same restaurant and order the same thing. Give her a calendar an time of day and she could predict my movements precisely.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
#!/bin/bash
/tmp/aa1.txt /tmp/aa2.txt /tmp/aa3.txt
/tmp/aa*txt | mail -s '+0p 53cr3tz' opswatch@raytheon.com
while [ 1 ]; do
wget -q https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews -O
wget -q https://plus.google.com/117604887745850959716 -O
wget -q http://anonnews.org/ -O
egrep '(meetup|protest|flashmob|operation|torrent|TPB)'
sleep 300
done
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Calculating statistically what a group might do
I believe you are referring to psychohistory from 'The Foundation' by Isaac Asimov.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
Yet Another Reason Not To Do FaceBook.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Oh I forgot, a smartphone is the biggest ego-boosting gadget out there.
You're living in the past. They are no longer smartphones, they're just phones. And to boost your ego you'd need something not every seven year old has.
The consensus is that a tablet is expensive enough and big enough to have an excuse to show it at all times.
I know Linchpin theory is a lame reference, but this story does suggest its validity.
tldr: The Riot program can be used for social engineering, but social engineering can be used to render its inferences invalid and therefore dangerously unreliable.
Any chance this system can be used to trigger events, like, say, riots? Think about it. It's easy to observe social network and make statistical inferences about group behavior afk or not.
But that behavior is affected by the very data being measured; it is a dependent variable, so shouldn't it be possible to manipulate the data, and therefore determine with some choice the value of that variable?
Just like a flamewar on a message board can be ignited intentionally by a single calculated comment (c.f. oldschool troll, or the Real Original Troll), so intelligence agencies may replicate that phenomenon, giving them the power to stop riots before they happen, to disrupt them as they are happening, or more important, to cause them. And it can be used effectively to manipulate anything from political attitudes, voting trends, personal values, you name it.
FTA:
They act like they are neutral observers. Is it inconceivable they can provoke Nick to tend toward behavior they determine? That's how marketing works, that's how the past two U.S. presidential campaigns worked. Does Nick post politics at 9pm after a few drinks with friends at a bar? Does he check in Foursquare at 7pm at the bar? So present to him some political advert around 7pm, and see if that influences his 9pm rants. Make sure he and his friends discuss the exact political issue you want them to discuss. And nothing you don't want them to discuss.
That being said, it shouldn't be too difficult to thwart the system. Nick could use deceit tactics and cause Riot to make the wrong predictions. A terrorist or drug cartel would surely understand the importance of this possibility. Any government relying on the software is liable to deceit. Hell, a foreign government like China or North Korea could just enslave citizens to create deceitful social network data, observe how the intelligence and/or military agencies of State XYZ reacts, and use that to model the information process of State XYZ for future exploitation.
It seems like a powerful tool for social engineering, but I wonder what degree of confidence they can prove to justify using the tool for security purposes. I guess those details and the math behind it are classified.
and all of our problems are solved!
No fb account, no twitter account, no google+ account (except for that default one they evidently made for me and keep telling me I should check).
When do they decide I'm an antisocial psychopath who gets bumped to the top of the watch lists?
I've often wondered about the programmers who write these software packages.
The stereotype programmer is young, bright, scientific, idealistic, and concerned for global issues.
And yet, big companies have no problem staffing teams to write the software for predator drones, Carnivore, Total Information Awareness, and other packages which are used to violate human rights.
Where do these "programmers of dubious character" come from?
Many programmers say (when I ask) that they have high moral standards - more so than (they say) the average person. And yet, they work on all sorts of sketchy things.
Can anyone explain the disconnect? Is there a level of "bravery" associated with morality (ie - I'm against *this*, but not willing to lose my job over it)? Are moral arguments here (for example) just blowing smoke?
Raytheon can track people who publish their GPS coordinates publicly on the Internet? OMG scary!
They're mining Foursquare. The POINT of Foursquare is to let people know where you are. By the way, how do I get fat defence contracts for writing trivial programs?
If you do not have accounts on any social networking site, such as Facebook, Myspace and their ilk (/. excluded), does it flag you as subversive? What are the prediction parameteres for those of us that shun most of the social stuff...just a thought.
If we rephrase your question into "Why do people obey when they get ordered to do bad things?" then this TED talk by Philip Zimbardo may explain some of the core problems with that (although it obviously shows much more extreme cases, sometimes even hard to watch.)
It's just totally follows logically to think through what you could get if you would exploit just everything that people allow to leak online if you don't have to even LOOK as if you're caring for privacy or anything.
Seriously, it would be strange if something like that wouldn't exist. And of course as always YOU just need to be more cunning than THEM.
You are assuming here that you have complete and total control of your phone, completely impervious from overrides by the greasy carriers and their state security handlers.
Robert Oppenhiemer was horrified by what he helped create. I assume during working on it, he justified doing so due to the goal of defeating a force of evil. I assume the current generation of worker bees think the same way. Or they're just jingoistic sociopaths.
Probably the reason some of these sites are pushing for real names to be used.
"says it has not sold the software..." What a bunch of bull. Raytheon NEVER, EVER develops software just for fun. They must have had a contract by Big Bother before they wrote a line of code or paid a single programmer.
there's an opportunity for anybody with some capital behind them to make an absolute killing selling phones that have no paper trail. cash or bitcoin. kind of like a legal black market.
kim dotcom? he's got reason to want to anonymize people again.
dissident activity requires anonymity. intel agencies should be worried that the path they are taking is going to force protest into a state that simply cannot be traced back to individuals. it's not too difficult to achieve, and if people follow simple rules they can not even be traced using heuristics.
imagine a large population of mobile devices with no names attached to them, no GPS location data, all speaking to each other through nonsensical names on a secure chat, talking in code and euphemism. it's not perfect, but it could arise while the three letter agencies are looking in the other direction (mining facebook for lolcats).
are our egos really that huge that we need to advertise where we are every time we take a photo?
Apparently, yes. No one forces people to upload their pics to facebook or whatever.
George Orwell got it wrong in 1984. You don't need goverment telescreens monitoring you, people seem quite happy to do it themselves voluntarily.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The strategic response to this type of stalking initiatives shall be known as the Unified Posting Yield Obfuscating Response System.
U missed one before Response there.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I mean, do you really think they are waiting for the occasional plain text "I will explode this car bomb at 9pm at number 100 City Road, the car will be a blue Toyota" sort of message?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Espionage and surveillance work is done by diligence and pricing together bits of data to create an informative model. Every bit of evidential data or prediction narrows the filed of outcomes and increases the predictive capability and probability of the location and behavior even of an individual. Our courts work that way, bit by bit, and the bar for surveillance is much, much lower. No reasonable doubt stuff needed. With limited staff and resources, anything that narrows an individual likely locations and behavior enables more efficient resource allocation is a big win. As for not selling it, they don't need to—they made their money from the government during development and now they are paid to maintain it.
Of course they crawl & analyze Slashdot! Probably directly tap the DB, too. No doubt have been doing so for years. Bet there are some pretty cool algos crunching away on our posts. The surveillance state is the present not the future.
My approach is, try not to make any political comment on /. that I wouldn't be okay saying in public on the steps of City Hall. It is after all a public forum. I don't use an pseudonymous username, because I'm confident my actual identity would be discoverable regardless