Raytheon RIOT Snoop App – Surveillance Threat
Raytheon, the Military Industrial Complex monstrosity, cooked up an app for the Government Called RIOT (Rapid Information Overlay Technology). As the flap rose and then quickly subsided, it appeared as if Raetheon built the app on spec, with the belief that the U.S. Government, and perhaps others would buy into it. Raytheon then made a video demo of the APP which made it to the net, and briefly went viral. Raytheon insisted that they had not sold the app.
The capabilities of the app are downright creepy. By scraping all the information it can find on the net about a “target” – with an emphasis on Social Media, where a majority of people “share” the most minute details of the lives, it builds a picture of where the target has been, who they were with, and it predicts where they might be at a specified time in the future.
Let’s listen to the audio from the Raytheon video.
[actual]
The claim that By analysing data by machine for “outliers”, or suspicious activity, we can catch the bad guys – and it’s OK, because only at that stage is another human being looking through your personal info — is fantasy.
For one thing, any algorithm will generate hundreds if not thousands of false positives (innocent people who hit a red flag). Given how rare, say, terrorism is, the vast majority of people bothered by these systems will be ordinary people facing previously unbelievable intrusion.
These systems and techniques are also highly coveted by todays facist governments: you know who you are!
It’s easy to believe those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear – and most of us are essentially decent people, with frankly boring social network profiles. But, of course, to (say) a petty official with a grudge, almost anything is enough: a skive from work, using the wrong bins, anything. Everyone’s got something someone could use against them, even if only for a series of annoyances.
Worst of all, we’re edging toward a reality where people are targeted and arrested not for what they do, but for what they think. The day of the thought police are here, and we have drones ready to be enforcers.
For DayPage.net, I’m Rex Latchford.