[governance] Alarming - Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm - Guardian

[Fouad Bajwa]

This is indeed very alarming -

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence

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

A Multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable
of tracking people's movements and predicting future behaviour 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
defence 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 analysing "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.



* Sharing for information purposes only.

-- 
Regards.
--------------------------
Fouad

-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t