C.I.A. AND GOOGLE PAL UP TO INVEST IN “THE FUTURE” OF MONITORING INTERNET ACTIVITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE July 29, 2010 (NATIONAL) -- The investment arms of the Central Intelligence Agency and Google are both backing a new 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future, according to a new report in WIRED magazine.
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.
WIRED says in a research paper the company claims 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 goal: to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down in the future.
The company then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event. CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science, is quoted in the report as saying, “The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases.”
Below is a video called TERRORISM ANALYSIS that portends to show visually how the system works.
This is not the first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies.
Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group.
In-Q-Tel, which handles investments for the CIA,, backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
