couple of years, in the UK. It was discovered that
the some police service had moles in peaceful
protest groups, and that they were encouraging
the groups to get violent, as an obvious trap.
The cost of this sort of stupid provocateur sh*t
was in the millions, per mole.
We just heard a couple of days ago , how they
got the names for the moles. Dead babies. Of
course, they did not ask the parents' permission.
They just stole the details including the whole
back story, except the death. Instant checkability,
for the peaceful protest groups that were paranoind
about moles. Of course, those groups were so
"nice" that they got rid of the members who were
suspicious of moles, because that was just not
being nice enough.
Well, a lot of former members are going
"I f*^%$king told ya".
Anyway, the spook businesses of the UK can now
save tons of money by using Raytheon's Riot
program, and I suppose it's available to them.
With it , they can track were anybody checks
in on their smartphone (not so smart, buddy) for
Facebook, Twitter and two odd ones, like
4square (?). It's especially easy to check your
3G pictures that you post, because they have
Longit. and Lat data. They can do a report on
your habits and boom, you're done. sealed in an
envelope.
Checkit: and don't use them damn phones!
[INCLUDES SPOOKY SPY VIDEO DEMONSTRATION]
Exclusive: Raytheon's Riot program mines social network data
like a 'Google for spies', drawing ire from civil rights groups [IT'S NOT AN EXCLUSIVE- IT'S ALL OVER THE NET, BUT IT WAS EARLY FOR A DOZY MSM OUTFIT- COS67]
Ryan Gallagher
The Guardian,
Sunday 10 February 2013 15.20 GMT
Jump to
comments (590)A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.
A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an
"extreme-scale analytics" system created by Raytheon, the world's
fifth largest defence 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 Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the
technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint
research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security
system capable of analysing "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.
The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same
social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be
transformed into a "Google for spies" and tapped as a means of
monitoring and control.
Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a
person's life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in
little more than a few clicks of a button.
In the video obtained by the Guardian, it is explained by
Raytheon's "principal investigator" Brian Urch that photographs users
post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details –
automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called "exif header
data."
Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the
photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location
at which the photographs were taken.
"We're going to track one of our own employees,"
Urch says in the video, before bringing up pictures of "Nick," a
Raytheon staff member used as an example target. With information gathered from
social networks, Riot quickly reveals Nick frequently visits Washington
Nationals Park, where on one occasion he snapped a photograph of himself posing
with a blonde haired woman.
"We know where Nick's going, we know what Nick looks like,"
Urch explains, "now we want to try to predict where he may be in the
future."
Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and
relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have
communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift
GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than
25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data
can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked
individuals and the times at which they visited them.
The video shows that Nick, who posts his location regularly
on Foursquare, visits a gym frequently at 6am early each week. Urch quips:
"So if you ever did want to try to get hold of Nick, or maybe get hold of
his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6am on a Monday."
Mining from public websites for law enforcement is
considered legal in most countries. In February last year, for instance, the
FBI requested help to develop a social-media mining application for monitoring
"bad actors or groups".
However, Ginger McCall, an attorney at the Washington-based
Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said the Raytheon technology raised
concerns about how troves of user data could be covertly collected without
oversight or regulation.
"Social networking sites are often not transparent
about what information is shared and how it is shared," McCall said.
"Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by
their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or
pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search."
Raytheon, which made sales worth an estimated $25bn (£16bn)
in 2012, did not want its Riot demonstration video to be revealed on the
grounds that it says it shows a "proof of concept" product that has
not been sold to any clients.
Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon's intelligence and
information systems department, said in an email: "Riot is a big data
analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and
commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable
information to help meet our nation's rapidly changing security needs.
"Its innovative privacy features are the most robust
that we're aware of, enabling the sharing and analysis of data without
personally identifiable information [such as social security numbers, bank or
other financial account information] being disclosed."
In December, Riot was featured in a newly published patent
Raytheon is pursuing for a system designed to gather data on people from social
networks, blogs and other sources to identify whether they should be judged a
security risk.
In April, Riot was scheduled to be showcased at a US
government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified
innovations, where it was listed under the category "big data – analytics,
algorithms."
According to records published by the US government's trade
controls department, the technology has been designated an "EAR99"
item under export regulations, which means it "can be shipped without a
licence to most destinations under most circumstances".
