Clues to the federal government's reason for collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers may be found in a recently unearthed 2010 project seeking to predict criminal activity using vast quantities of data on citizens mined from social network websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
In February, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the Massachusetts-based multinational corporation, Raytheon – the world's fifth largest defense contractor – had developed a "Google for Spies" operation.
Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote that Raytheon had "secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites" like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.
The software is called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology.
Raytheon told the Herald it has not sold RIOT to any clients but admitted that, in 2010, it had shared the program's software technology with the U.S. government as part of a "joint research and development effort … to help build a national security system capable of analyzing 'trillions of entities' from cyberspace."
In April, RIOT was reportedly showcased at a U.S. government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category "big data – analytics, algorithms."
Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, argued that major ethical dilemmas ensue although RIOT apparently utilizes only publicly available information from companies like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/obama-mining-facebook-twitter-to-predict-crimes/
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