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 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.
The "How People Use It" page on Recorded Future's website makes absolutely no attempt to hide The Creepy:
Research a person
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
Exclusive: Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring (Wired Danger Room blog)
Video above, a trailer of sorts for "Recorded Future."
