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."

Comments

easy solution

[msheekhah]

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.

Re:easy solution

[Thanshin]

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.

How can you be sure that everyone who's participating in that same protest followed your advice?

They don't need the information you post if they already have the information other people post about you.

Re:sample data

[TWX]

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.

R.I.O.T. sourcecode

[sl4shd0rk]

#!/bin/bash

while [ 1 ]; do
   wget -q https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews -O /tmp/aa1.txt
   wget -q https://plus.google.com/117604887745850959716 -O /tmp/aa2.txt
   wget -q http://anonnews.org/ -O /tmp/aa3.txt

   egrep '(meetup|protest|flashmob|operation|torrent|TPB)' /tmp/aa*txt | mail -s '+0p 53cr3tz' opswatch@raytheon.com
   sleep 300
done

Programmer ethics?

[Okian Warrior]

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?