This just in from Wired.com’s Danger Room blog: Google and the CIA are working together to monitor people on the internet real-time in order to predict people’s actions and behaviors as well as events.

The report states that both the Central Intelligence Agency and Google are backing a company called Recorded Future.

Recorded Future monitors the web in real-time and uses the information to predict the future.

Recorded Future can search and analyze many thousands of sites, blogs and Twitter updates to identify connections between people, groups, behaviors and events.

The company claims to use a “temporal analytics engine” that far surpasses modern search technology.

Recorded Future harnesses the chatter of online people and crowds to get insight into future events.

They measure each incident to find out who was involved, where it happened or when it could happen.

This collection of online buzz is then graphed to show the “momentum” for events.

According to the company’s CEO, Chris Ahlberg, “The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,”

Although Google has funded spy technology before, this is believed to be the first time that the CIA and Google have invested in the same company at the same time.

Both the CIA and Google have shown an increase in interest in mining “open source intelligence” and public information that is accessible to all, but is often covered in the constant barrage of television news, newspaper articles, blog updates, Twitter posts, web videos and other media updates.

Former CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a group of people in 2008 that “there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open”.

While Recorded Future analyses the real-time web to make predictions, they also store an index with over 100 million events.

Ahlberg told Wired.com, “We are right there as it happens We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Recorded Future currently maintains a blog devoted to Intelligence Analytics at AnalysisIntelligence.com.

The CIA’s In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures both have seats on Recorded Future’s corporate board.

The news of Google’s new intel venture follows recent privacy issues involving the company. Concerns about how Google collects and uses its collection of search data.

Google collects and retains a mountain of personal data on every detail of people’s online search and browsing activities.

You can watch a Recorded Future demo below:

[ Source: Wired.com ]

The Australian government has been busy mapping the facial features of adult citizens that will be stored in a government database and used with facial recognition software to identify and track people on public surveillance cameras.

Until now, few Australians were aware that their facial features were being mapped and stored in a central database of drivers license pictures that the Government is sharing with state and federal police.

Facial recognition experts claim successful match rates are around 90 percent, causing concerns that the names of people with faces that have a similar structure to recorded criminals could be misidentified.

Australian police want to use facial recognition in smart CCTV cameras that would make it easy to track people on public surveillance cameras.

Some airports already use face recognition tools and there has been talk of the US using the technology at border crossing checkpoints.

The Australian government began building the facial recognition database last December.

Government officials say the database will eventually be shared with other government departments.

[ Source: Daily Telegraph ]

Due to its heavy reliance on public surveillance cameras, growing public databases and intrusive government power over its citizens daily lives, Britain has become a poster nation for the modern “surveillance society”.

Britain was recently ranked as one of the five worst nations for its record on privacy and surveillance.

However the surveillance of citizen Jenny Paton, a mother of three, by local officials seems especially egregious.

When officials suspected Ms. Paton of lying about her residence to get her daughter enrolled in a neighborhood school, they started a secret surveillance of Ms Paton that included accessing her phone records.

In addition, a local education department official secretly followed Ms. Paton, recording her movements in a log that identified her and her kids as a “female and three children” and her car as the “target vehicle”.

Ms. Paton broke no laws and her daughter has been admitted into the school. However, the case is scheduled to be reviewed by a regulatory tribunal at her request.

The Poole Borough Council maintains that it has done nothing wrong.

A law enacted in 2000 that regulates surveillance by government departments states that it is lawful for local governments to follow citizens secretly. Local governments often use these surveillance powers without oversight from any judges or law enforcement officials to investigate people.

The law is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act ( RIPA ) and it also gives 474 local governments and 318 agencies surveillance powers that were once reserved for only a few law enforcement and security organizations.

RIPA gives local governments and agencies the power to record people with hidden cameras, access communication information such as telephone calls and internet activity as well as using undercover investigators to spy on people.

Sir Christopher Rose, Britain’s chief surveillance commissioner, reported that local governments conducted 5,000 “directed surveillance missions” during the year ending in March 2009 and other public authorities conducted an additional 5,000 surveillance jobs.

Citizens like Ms. Paton wonder if privacy has any meaning in the Orwellian “Big Brother” system that has been created by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

One of the major criticisms of RIPA is that the people being spied on are usually not aware that they are being tracked and followed.

Indeed, Ms. Paton only discovered what had been done to her when local officials met with her to review her daughter’s school application and showed her the surveillance report and a copy of her telephone records.

Source: NY Times

Ali is a specially trained German shepherd that has eight years of experience sniffing out narcotics for law enforcement. He now works for a private company, sniffing around teenagers’ bedrooms for drugs.

Ali works for a New Jersey company called Sniff Dogs.

Sniff Dogs rents drug-sniffing dogs to parents for around $200 an hour. The company was started this year by Debra Stone, who says her five narcotics-sniffing canines can find heroin, cocaine, crystal meth and ecstasy in teens bedrooms.

The dogs’ sense of smell is so sensitive that they can detect a marijuana seed from as far as 15 feet away and marijuana residue on clothing from drugs smoked two nights before.

New Jersey parent Pat Winterstein was curious about Sniff Dogs and hired the company to search her teenagers’ rooms.

The dogs did not find any drugs in her teens’ rooms, but she says that she will keep doing the tests to ensure that her kids are staying away from drugs.

Some critics say this tactic could break down trust between parents and children, but Winterstein says it offers her peace of mind.

Parents are also using other creative ways to monitor teenagers’ activities. There are now Global Positioning System devices that can be sewn into kids clothing to monitor their driving speeds, and software that lets parents read their childrens’ text messages.

Some psychologists say these new surveillance tools can backfire, eroding chil-parent trust in the process.

Melinda Bennington said that she wishes that she would have had drug dogs to help her see the warnings signs before it was too late. Melinda’s son Tom died of a drug overdose two years ago.

As parents, Bennington and Winterstein agree that monitoring teens’ behavior is not only a parent’s right, but also a responsibility.

Source: ABC News

The U.K.’s Telegraph is reporting that the average British citizen is recorded around 3,000 times per week.

Every phone call, use of a card or computer, creates personal information that is being recorded and stored on British citizens.

The Sunday Telegraph is reporting on the vast amounts of personal data that is being recorded on people by the British Government, law enforcement and corporations daily.

The average person living in Britain has well over 3,000 pieces of personal information recorded and stored on them, most of this information is held in databases for years and sometimes indefinitely.

Personal information that is recorded includes shopping data, cell phone use, emails, daily location information, travels and internet search data.

British information watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office, is calling for stricter regulation of the amount of information that is recorded and stored on people and is warning the public to restrict the data they allow groups to keep on them.

Public security breaches and the loss of personal information by Government agencies has increased the concerns about the amount of personal data being recorded.

The average person in Britain makes three cell phone calls and sends at least two text messages.

Cell phone services log information about who was called and the caller’s geographic location and direction of travel, this is computed triangulation from cell phone towers.

People can also have their locations recorded even when they are not using their phones, since cell phones send out unique signals at regular intervals.

Internet service providers record information on customers whenever they use the internet, including name, address and IP address, as well as browser type and location information.

Internet service providers also record people’s email useage.

Store “loyalty” cards record shopping information on people who use them. They link people’s personal information to the stores used, the purchase times and the amount of money spent.

Banks also record large amounts of information on people.

They also provide personal data to credit agencies, debt collectors and fraud prevention departments.

Debit and credit card use can provide information on purchases and locations.

The largest amount of surveillance in Britain is through the network of CCTV surveillance cameras used in public. A person will appear on 300 CCTV cameras during an average day in Britain and those surveillance tapes are kept by many departments for an indefinite period of time.

Britain now has more public surveillance cameras than any other nation in the world. It is estimated that there are more than 4.2 million surveillance cameras in the U.K.

A new use for CCTV recordings is the use of automatic number plate recognition systems, which read number-plates and search databases for signs that a vehicle has been used in crime.

A national automatic number plate recognition system is maintained by the Association of Chief Police Officers. Every number plate recorded by the system is stored in a database with date, time and location for two years.

Travel passes also reveal large amounts of information about people. When they are registered to a person’s name, they record travel history, dates and time.

Companies are increasingly using radio frequency security passes for employees, providing them with information about when staff enter and leave the building.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk