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The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of
websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people,
organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a
white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search”
by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same,
or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened
and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing
online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says
company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in
computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to
Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which
handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy
agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security
Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret
signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was
bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and
Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google
of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be
fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy
with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its
“don’t be evil” mantra.
