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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."
facebook would probably sell it to them cheap if they asked.
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
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.
You're assuming that they need access to private data on Facebook to make this work. Between the lack of people fine-tuning their privacy settings, and the ability of other users to note what one is doing even if one doesn't share such information, and it's no surprise that they can develop this software.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
#!/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.........
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?
It's not intended for people like Chris D.
It's intended to gauge the sentiments of the masses, to warn the local rulers before the uprising starts. I'm pretty sure they have a pretty good market in the Middle East right now. It doesn't do anything about lone killers or terrorists.
This reeks of "schleppnetzfahndung", a term used to describe the use of similar data by the West German police to combat terrorism in the 70's. It did catch a couple of terrorists. It also got tens of thousands of citizens banned from working in all kinds of jobs, because they had the wrong friends, read the wrong papers or were members of the wrong trade union. For a lot of people, that seemed to be the main reason to use that method. It certainly had a very chilling impact on dissidents.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)