
The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos - togetherasone
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-investments-social-media-mining-looms-large/
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gozur88
Makes sense. They don't need to go poking through your stuff if you put it all
online willingly. I would go so far as to say they're being negligent if they
_don 't_ go through all potentially fruitful sources of public data.

I've never understood it, but people proactively put all kinds of important
data online. People have been busted for _murder_ because they bragged about
it on twitter, so I wouldn't at all be surprised to see some guy posting
selfies of himself next to a bomb he plans to use in a marketplace attack, or
a picture of himself along with the other people in his terrorist cell.

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josephpmay
They've been doing this for awhile, and it's actively used in the Middle East
to predict locations of IED. Also DOD has a tendency of creating shell
companies to buy up these startups without the usual oversight.

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tobltobs
> Middle East to predict locations of IED.

Would be interesting to know how that would work.

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philsalesses
They use existing IED locations and layers of GIS data to determine where
terrorists would be likely to place them. For instance, they use events as
training data and then measure distance to light posts, distance from school,
distance from whatever to create heat maps of high risk IED areas. The problem
is the terrorists algorithm changes as we get better at stopping them. Cat and
mouse.

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cloudjacker
I'm pretty sure that was the whole purpose of the Twitter Streaming API

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NN88
Thats just good police work, IMO.

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chinathrow
The CIA isn't police.

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NN88
Uh...yeah. They are.

You all hate belgium and paris and mumbai and lower manhattan
attacks...but...don't want to accept the reality of what it takes to prevent
them.

You can't have it both ways. You know you can't....all you can hope is for
better regulation.

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EliRivers
Perhaps if we'd had better regulation while the CIA was running around
destabilising parts of the world and installing the dictatorships that led to
the current situation, we wouldn't be in this mess.

As it is, we know what it takes to prevent these attacks; a few generations of
sane foreign policy that doesn't leave large chunks of various populations so
full of anger and rage and humiliation that they're willing to blow themselves
up just to hurt someone, anyone. Preventing an attack here and an attack there
is just noise against the backdrop of civilian deaths every day from the
groups we've created. So we could prevent an attack in Paris, at the cost of
our liberty. A number of deaths that's basically noise. When do we prevent the
everyday slaughter of people who aren't living in Europe at the hands of these
same groups? How many of those deaths are prevented by me surrendering my
privacy? Why should we give up our freedoms to prevent a tiny handful of
deaths against a backdrop of daily slaughter? And furthermore, give them up
while I can see our leaders, instead of beginning the three generations of
sane foreign policy, continuing to exacerbate the problem? Maybe if the deal
was that it was a short term thing, just while the root of the problem was
fixed, I could get on board, but I see no sign of that.

Frankly, giving up our freedoms _is_ the pathetic, easy choice. It's the
cowardly choice and the way to refuse to deal with the real issues, because
the real issues are expensive and hard and will take a long time.

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nicelynicely
Thank you for writing that.

The only way this will get fixed is if European people take a stand.

That means taking a stand against america and american politics/war mongering,
that is sad but its gone too far.

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l0c0b0x
As I was cramming through the news list, I read "The CIA is investigating
Firms that mine your tweets and instagram photos" and thought "Way to go
CIA!". Then realized this was out of the ordinary and re-read it.

:|

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slim
Docker is on In-Q-tel portfolio

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Wonderdonkey
Came here to see if anyone else noticed that and what people made of it. That
was the real revelation in this story.

If nothing else, if you followed that one tutorial on running a Tor hidden
service using Docker, maybe stop doing that now.

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sremani
I would be surprised if they did not do it. FB, Twitter, Instagram these are
used as propaganda tools and have a trove of information.

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th0ma5
Them and everyone else though, right?

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anotheryou
I misread it as "investigating"... too bad I was wrong.

