People who are dumb enough to post information that could incriminate them on Facebook and twitter and such deserve to be caught.

your assumption that such programs have been operational for some time would be correct. several gov't agencies have had programs like this running for years already. raytheon may have come up with a new way of doing it or something, but they didn't come up with anything new.

This is nothing new. Take a look at Touchgraph SEO. It does much the same thing. Then there is Maltego.

Those people who work in OSINT have had these tools for years.

Originally posted by ollncasino
I have always assumed that such programs have been operational for some time. I may not be too wrong in assuming that this software is the tip of an iceberg.

You'd be right. SOC and DIA have had them running for years, first as Able Danger, now as Able Providence, although they don't call it that for obvious reasons.

It's not Raytheon they use, though. But it does mine things like Facebook and Twitter, combs the net looking for relationships, draws inferences about you that are amazingly apt. And it tracks how you interact with other people nearby you on your graph, especially if your friends are criminals or turrists.

If you don't normally buy tahini, but your buddy Achmed McWatchlist does, and one day you buy some tahini, and no one knows where Achmed is right now, it will infer that he is at your house and start looking for corroborative data, for instance.

Originally posted by MX44K
People who are dumb enough to post information that could incriminate them on Facebook and twitter and such deserve to be caught.

SOC's sw doesn't just look at WHAT you post, it's as much who you tend to post to, or about, or you post similar things.

They want to know who you're intimate with. If I post back and forth with Phage a lot, or Zaphod, it'll take note of that and associate us. If zaphod uses the same moniker on a model railroad site that lists his real-life name, it'll guess that's probably the same zaphod. Same with Bedlam. Then it'll look to see if we post in our real-life names to each other. That's the info they want. Who are you close to?