Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or
IARPA, is behind the program called Automated Low-Level Analysis and
Description of Diverse Intelligence Video (ALADDIN).
The advent of cell phone cams and online video hubs means
thousands of clips are uploaded every day.
America's spy services have become increasingly
interested in mining "open source intelligence" — information that's
publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows,
newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.
Until now, uploaded videos contain such diverse scenes
and situations, not to mention grainy images and sound, that it's much harder
to prep algorithms for automated evaluation. And human analysts only have so
much time for the "eyes-on-video/ears-on-audio" routine.
Despite the challenge of analyzing uploaded videos, spy
agencies appear to be already doing it. In 2008, the chief of the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence's Open Source Center noted that "YouTube
... carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence."
But now, both the CIA and Google are said to be backing a
company that monitors the Web in real time — and uses that information to
predict the future.
Using data from websites and social networks, the company
creates dossiers on people that may be key to intelligence officials. Their algorithms
were allegedly able to prove Hezbollah was in possession of long-range missiles
using a backlog of statements from the group's leader.
Experts cite the CIA's investment in the company as
indication their technology will be used by intelligence.
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.
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."
For example, they take an incident and try to decipher
who was involved and where it happened.
Recorded Future alleges it can then plot that chatter,
showing online "momentum" for any given event.
"The cool thing is, you can actually predict the
curve, in many cases," company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish
Army Ranger with a Ph.D. in computer science, told WIRED, which broke the story
on Thursday.
Interestingly, this is not the first time Google has done
business with America's spy agencies. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole,
which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google
Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the
intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same
time.
As yet, Google has not been accused of directly
collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for
critics of Google, who already see the search giant as working too closely with
the US government.
US spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a
number of firms to help them better find that information. One company trawls
over half a million websites a day, scraping more than a million posts and
conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon.
Keyhole, now Google Earth, is a staple of the targeting
cells in military-intelligence units.
In some corners, the scrutiny of the company's political
ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its
enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google,
as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our
online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the
quality of their products, and because of Google's pledges not to misuse the
information still ring true to many.
But unease has been growing.
"Assurances from the likes of Google that the
company can be trusted to respect consumers' privacy because its corporate
motto is 'don't be evil' have been shown by recent events such as the 'Wi-Spy'
debacle to be unwarranted," long-time corporate critic John Simpson told a
congressional hearing.
Ryan Calo, a fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for
Internet and Society, is concerned as to how the information will be used to
target suspected terrorists.
"Are we trusting Google to be experts enough in
terrorist propaganda to know what to take down?" Calo told reporters.  "That seems like a really
extraordinary difficult calculus to make. And in the absence of a definitive
answer, let's err on the side of free speech. On the side of neutrality of
communications."
Others argue that one can never get rid of violent
propaganda on the Internet, but all should be done to make such material harder
to find.