Raytheon, a multi-national defense company, has secretly developed a social-networking spy program that can track people’s online movements and anticipate future behavior by mining data from social-networking websites.
The “extreme-scale analytics” system named Riot or Rapid Information Overlay Technology created by the Massachusetts-based company can collect infinite amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
The company, the fifth-largest military contractor in the world, has not yet sold the software, but it shared the technology with the US government and industry in 2010 to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.