Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm Exclusive: Raytheon's Riot program mines social network data like a 'Google for spies', drawing ire from civil rights groups

Ryan Gallagher

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior 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 defense 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 analyzing "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.

http://m.guardiannews.com/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence

Even gather can be subjected to this ,  it's that easy. Gather could be what we think temp. off line, or something strange happens and even CHuck doesn't know why but all these freaks have to do is turn this onto to key words through the world of the internet and see where the people are who are opposed to what the Government is subjecting us to " spying".The site suddenly is not available, or doesn't let you post a certain article, maybe a video, or maybe it gets taken down anything is possible.

Invading us and our privacy.  Sites have even been forced to kick people off because they voiced an opinion that didn't agree with the Obama follower. The president who enforced these big cry baby laws, didn't do it for the sake of " protecting the so called reasons " he claims the bully law is full of bs.....

This rant can't even go on for now, but it is something to realize how many things that just so happened to be where kids were involved this sick Government used kids to do it and use kids for their population control.  The military is high on the list as well.