Voorlopig is de zoekmachine nog in ontwikkeling, maar de Amerikaanse overheid toont zeer veel interesse in de software. Tegelijkertijd ontstaat er een nieuwe golf bezorgdheid over onze vrijheid en recht op privacy.
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.
De technologie kan iemands leven volledig in kaart brengen op basis van informatie dat het prgramma van verschillende sociale media kan halen. Gallagher probeert het zelf eens uit bij een collega.
We're going to track one of our own employees, Urch says in the video, before bringing up pictures of Nick, a Raytheon staff member used as an example target. With information gathered from social networks, Riot quickly reveals Nick frequently visits Washington Nationals Park, where on one occasion he snapped a photograph of himself posing with a blonde haired woman. "We know where Nick's going, we know what Nick looks like," Urch explains, "now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future." Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them.
In de meeste landen is het extraheren van persoonlijke informatie op sociale netwerken om criminele personen of groepen op te sporen een legale activiteit. Maar Ginger McCall, een advocaat van de Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre, stelt zich kritische vragen bij deze nieuwe technologie.
However, Ginger McCall, an attorney at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said the Raytheon technology raised concerns about how troves of user data could be covertly collected without oversight or regulation. Social networking sites are often not transparent about what information is shared and how it is shared, McCall said. Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search.
Raytheon was niet opgezet met de gelekte demonstratievideo en benadrukt dat de software nog niet in handen is van geïnteresseerden.
Raytheon, which made sales worth an estimated $25bn (£16bn) in 2012, did not want its Riot demonstration video to be revealed on the grounds that it says it shows a proof of concept product that has not been sold to any clients. Jared Adams, a spokesman for Raytheon's intelligence and information systems department, said in an email: Riot is a big data analytics system design we are working on with industry, national labs and commercial partners to help turn massive amounts of data into useable information to help meet our nation's rapidly changing security needs.
Raytheon stelde de technologie in april aan de Amerikaanse overheid en diverse veiligheidsdiensten voor. Momenteel staat de technologie geclassificeerd als een 'EAR99'-product: de technologie mag zonder licentie in de meeste omstandigheden naar verschillende bestemmingen getransfereerd worden.
In December, Riot was featured in a newly published patent Raytheon is pursuing for a system designed to gather data on people from social networks, blogs and other sources to identify whether they should be judged a security risk. In April, Riot was scheduled to be showcased at a US government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category "big data – analytics, algorithms." According to records published by the US government's trade controls department, the technology has been designated an EAR99 item under export regulations, which means it can be shipped without a licence to most destinations under most circumstances.
