• Wired.com, Thursday, July 29, 2010 2:17 PM

Creating much fodder for conspiracy theorists, libertarians, and Drudge-devotees, the CIA and Google are backing a company that monitors the Web in real time in order to predict the future, Wired.com reports. "The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of Web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come," writes Wired.com's Danger Room blog.

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." According to Wired, "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." No stranger to spy agencies, Google reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks at one time, and is even reported to have sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group.

Read the whole story at Wired.com »