Google & CIA invest in company, will predict your moves

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The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”

The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

Why am I starting to get reminded of Minority Report...

True that. I wonder how big of a supercomputer they need to actually make an accurate calculation...

An accurate prediction is not possible, as the work of Lorenz demonstrated decades ago.

Indeed. I'd guess it would work statistically and just enable the security agencies to focus their attention on more likely "suspects" than otherwise.

Somewhat Orwellian wouldn't you agree?

Big Brother truly is watching.