forget Drones, data mining technology expects to predict your behavior, and this is developing in
commercial markets on it's own. Businesses were getting into this before the Government intelligence people got onto it.
What started out as a commercial applicatioin as a way to increase advertizing effectiveness and revenues is morphing into something potentially seriously sinister. ...no, really!
... and it uses information freely available in the public domain (mostly through the internet using data freely offerred by users) - of course, the users of this data aren't necessarily going to be satisfied with that.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/tech-companies-online-surveillance-nsa?page=2
Predicting You
Listening to phone calls, recording locations, and breaking into computers are just one part of the tool kit that the data-mining companies offer to US (and other) intelligence agencies. Think of them as the data equivalents of oil and natural gas drilling companies that are ready to extract the underground riches that have been stashed over the years in strongboxes in our basements.
What government agencies really want, however, is not just the ability to mine, but to refine those riches into the data equivalent of high-octane fuel for their investigations in very much the way we organize our own data to conduct meaningful relationships, find restaurants, or discover new music on our phones and computers.
These technologiesvariously called social network analysis or semantic analysis toolsare now being packaged by the surveillance industry as ways to expose potential threats that could come from surging online communities of protesters or anti-government activists. Take Raytheon, a major US military manufacturer, which makes Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, Maverick air-to-ground missiles, Patriot surface-to-air missiles, and Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missiles. Their latest product is a software package eerily named "Riot" that claims to be able to predict where individuals are likely to go next using technology that mines data from social networks like Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter.
Raytheon's Rapid Information Overlay Technology softwareyes, that's how they got the acronym Riotextracts location data from photos and comments posted online by individuals and analyzes this information. The result is a variety of spider diagrams that purportedly will show where that individual is most likely to go next, what she likes to do, and whom she communicates with or is most likely to communicate with in the near future.
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pffshht
(79 posts)jeff47
(26,549 posts)Shutting down the NSA's programs does not restore privacy. We need new laws.
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)TroglodyteScholar
(5,477 posts)...it will predict that I (and many others) don't exist.