July 30, 2010

Google, CIA support future-predicting website

Recorded Future scans social networks, blogs, and websites to find relationships, organizations, actions and incident data related to topics like terrorism

By PoliceOne Staff

BOSTON — A company that searches publicly available data to predict future events has gained support from Google and an investment firm launched by the CIA.

Recorded Future scans Twitter accounts, blogs, and websites to find relationships, organizations, actions and incident data related to topics like terrorism.

The company's software then charts the data over time to find trending events and predict when they might occur in the future.

One video posted on the company's YouTube channel suggests a potential for predicting terrorism trends and counterterrorism analysis.

In-Q-Tel, launched by the CIA in 1999, and Google Ventures both invested an undisclosed amount of less than $10 million into the company soon after it was founded in 2009, according to Wired.

The CIA has previously stated an interest in mining "open source intelligence" that consists of publicly available data embedded among the vast, daily broadcast media including TV, newspapers, blogs, radio and a large portion of social networks.

Recorded Future features a team of computer scientists, statisticians and linguists with experience in realms like intelligence, accord to the company's website.