"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Monday 23 August 2010

Surveillance, Clairvoyance and Prophecy via the (super)Conscious Web

G00gle and CIA Invest in ‘FUTURE’ of Web Monitoring
Surveillance, Clairvoyance and Prophecy via the (super)Conscious Web
 
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses 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 cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.
America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.
“Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession,” then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. “In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.
U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called “unstructured text” of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (“spatial and temporal analysis”) and the tone of the document (“sentiment analysis”). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
“We’re right there as it happens,” Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. “We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”
Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah’s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres’ accusations.
That’s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it’s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency’s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn’t make investments in firms without an “end customer” ready to test out that company’s products.
Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren’t disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google’s investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.
Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future’s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been “very helpful,” providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it’s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg’s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.
Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: “We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT’s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn’t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google’s critics — including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen — the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama’s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House’s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.
In some corners, the scrutiny of the company’s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google’s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.
But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)
“Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers’ privacy because its corporate motto is ‘don’t be evil’ have been shown by recent events such as the ‘Wi-Spy’ debacle to be unwarranted,” long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA’s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.
But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn’t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.
“To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard — from contracts to deliverables — I don’t see a problem with it,” he told Danger Room by e-mail. “But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.”



ARTICLE SOURCE
via http://paraspiracy.com/home/?p=1550
And see http://newilluminati.blog-city.com/here_at_half_past_human_we_forecast_the_future.htm

 
For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com


This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com
 http://newilluminati.blog-city.com

25 comments:

  1. I am really enjoying reading your well written articles. It looks like you spend a lot of effort and time on your blog. I have bookmarked it and I am looking forward to reading new articles. Keep up the good work.

    Data Science Course

    ReplyDelete
  2. Two full thumbs up for this magneficent article of yours. I've really enjoyed reading this article today and I think this might be one of the best article that I've read yet. Please, keep this work going on in the same quality.

    Data Science Course in Mangalore

    ReplyDelete
  3. It is great article and good video. But you don't have comments under your video. If you want to get good comments visit this site https://viplikes.net. It is the best place to get youtube comments

    ReplyDelete

  4. First You got a great blog .I will be interested in more similar topics. I see you have really very useful topics, i will be always checking your blog thanks.
    business analytics course

    ReplyDelete
  5. Took me time to understand all of the comments, but I seriously enjoyed the write-up. It proved being really helpful to me and Im positive to all of the commenters right here! Its constantly nice when you can not only be informed, but also entertained! I am certain you had enjoyable writing this write-up.

    Data Science Course in Trichy

    ReplyDelete
  6. Impressive. Your story always bring hope and new energy. Keep up the good work.

    Data Science Course in Chandigarh

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks for posting the best information and the blog is very interesting.Data science course in Varanasi

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you so much. I feel good to read you article. Really it is very informational. Here I am suggesting the Best Digital Marketing Course in Gurgaon. 99 Digital Academy is Best Institute in Gurgaon to Learn Digital Marketing. Enroll today.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Xavier Espinoza3 August 2021 at 18:37

    I think it is already our reality. If you have smartphone they can monitor what you are doing every second. Especially such social networks like instagram. If you want to be popular on instagram buy followers from here https://soclikes.com/buy-instagram-followers

    ReplyDelete
  10. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  11. At the bottom line, Online Marketing as a new mechanism not only generates the targeted traffic but also generates more sales and revenue. So we are also aimed to provide the knowledge of Online Advertising ineffectively designed & advanced Training Sessions. If Web & Internet Marketing is your passion, we are here to make you walk through Promotional Tips and SEO PPC Management.
    digital marketing course in Bangalore

    ReplyDelete
  12. There is no such educational degree required to go ahead with the course but one can have a bachelor's degree in any stream and must be familiar to work on computers with basic knowledge of MS Office, Website Browsing, Performing Search, and Analytics.
    digital marketing training online

    ReplyDelete
  13. Very nice job... Thanks for sharing this amazing and educative blog post! business analytics course in mysore

    ReplyDelete
  14. Wow , i learned something new here. i wish you will post more article just like this one

    "Abacus Trainer provides the Best Abacus Online Classes for kids. Best platform for Vedic Math Online Training classes from certified teachers for 5 years children.

    To know more about AbacusTrainer

    Visit: online abacus classes!

    ReplyDelete
  15. I will truly value the essayist's decision for picking this magnificent article fitting to my matter.Here is a profound depiction about the article matter which helped me more.
    data science course fee in hyderabad

    ReplyDelete
  16. Wow, happy to see this awesome post. I hope this think help any newbie for their awesome work. By the way thanks for share this awesomeness from data scientist course in kanpur

    ReplyDelete
  17. In just four months, you can become a Data Scientist by enrolling in the top Data Science Certification Course in Jaipur. Your career prospects will improve. data science course in Jaipur

    ReplyDelete
  18. Great tips and very easy to understand. This will definitely be very useful for me when I get a chance to start my blog.
    cyber security course

    ReplyDelete
  19. It will also let you know that is the data scientist's jobs are at risk with this automation. So let's get started.

    ReplyDelete
  20. I am a new user of this site, so here I saw several articles and posts published on this site, I am more interested in some of them, will provide more information on these topics in future articles.
    youtube training course in hyderabad

    ReplyDelete
  21. Python is a programming language that enables quicker work and more efficient system integration. Because of its simplicity, ease of use, and accessibility to libraries like NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib, it is one of the best languages used by data scientists for a variety of data science applications. You will gain a multidisciplinary skill set and be prepared to work with massive volumes of data to find insights and solutions to business challenges after completing this data science certification course. Having this certification will provide you a technical understanding of computer science and statistics in addition to a postgraduate degree. It covers the spring framework, hibernate, and advanced java.data science training institute in jaipur

    ReplyDelete

Add your perspective to the conscious collective