{"id":145,"date":"2012-03-29T14:05:06","date_gmt":"2012-03-29T14:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.algerienetwork.com\/magazine\/?p=138"},"modified":"2012-03-29T14:05:06","modified_gmt":"2012-03-29T14:05:06","slug":"la-cia-et-google-financent-un-mouchard-du-net","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/la-cia-et-google-financent-un-mouchard-du-net\/","title":{"rendered":"La CIA et Google financent un mouchard du Net"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recorded Future est une entreprise am\u00e9ricaine bas\u00e9e \u00e0 Boston dont les activit\u00e9s, sans \u00eatre fonci\u00e8rement surprenantes, ne manqueront pas d\u2019inspirer la m\u00e9fiance aux internautes, surtout quand on sait, gr\u00e2ce un article de Wired, que la CIA et Google ont tous deux investi dans la soci\u00e9t\u00e9.<\/p>\n

Son rayon d\u2019activit\u00e9 est le suivant : avec son autoproclam\u00e9 \u00ab premier Moteur Temporel d\u2019Analyses au monde \u00bb (\u00e7a passe mieux en VO avec Temporal Analytics Engine), Recorded Future passe le web au peigne fin, \u00ab scannant en continu des milliers d\u2019articles de presse, de blogs, de sites peu connus, de publications professionnelles, de sites gouvernementaux, de bases de donn\u00e9es financi\u00e8res, et plus encore \u00bb. Dans le \u00ab plus encore \u00bb, on peut par exemple inclure les comptes Twitter (seulement les comptes publics, a priori), comme ce sch\u00e9ma propos\u00e9 sur son site le pr\u00e9sente :<\/p>\n

En version anim\u00e9e et avec une voix robotique pas des masses rassurante, voil\u00e0 comment l\u2019entreprise se pr\u00e9sente via YouTube :<\/p>\n

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Apr\u00e8s le scan des sites, le site se lance ensuite dans l\u2019extraction et l\u2019organisation des informations en les classant par des mots-cl\u00e9s de mani\u00e8re chronologique. R\u00e9sultat : \u00ab vous pouvez explorer le pass\u00e9, le pr\u00e9sent et le futur pr\u00e9vu d\u2019\u00e0 peu pr\u00e8s tout. Des outils puissants de visualisation vous permettent d\u2019extraire des patterns (mod\u00e8les) temporels, et de voir appara\u00eetre des r\u00e9seaux d\u2019informations li\u00e9es \u00bb, dixit le site en des termes qui rappeleront peut-\u00eatre \u00e0 certains de r\u00e9centes s\u00e9ries B parano\u00efaques style Ennemi d\u2019Etat ou L\u2019\u0153il du mal. Surtout quand on lit les passages mentionnant ce type de recherches cette fois-ci li\u00e9es \u00e0 des personnes, et non des th\u00e8mes d\u2019actualit\u00e9. L\u2019entreprise ne se cache pas de pouvoir pr\u00e9voir vos futures destinations de voyage, tout comme vos opinions politiques, situation familiale, etc.<\/p>\n

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La vid\u00e9o de d\u00e9monstration suivante, upload\u00e9e en mars dernier, tombe assez bien en cette actu charg\u00e9e sur l\u2019Afghanistan (merci WikiLeaks), et permet de comprendre l\u2019int\u00e9r\u00eat d\u2019une agence de renseignement comme la CIA face aux activit\u00e9s de Recorded Future. Notez au passage le type d\u2019illustration musicale choisie qui se passe de commentaire :<\/p>\n

En terme de mod\u00e8le \u00e9conomique, l\u2019entreprise mise sur le mod\u00e8le freemium, avec une option gratuite (\u00ab Futures \u00bb) qui permet de recevoir des alertes sp\u00e9cifiques par email, et une version Premium \u00e0 149 dollars par mois (115 euros). Les fameux outils de visualisation vant\u00e9s plus t\u00f4t ne sont \u00e9videmment accessibles qu\u2019avec cette deuxi\u00e8me et co\u00fbteuse option. Si Google a d\u00e9j\u00e0 eu diverses occasions de collaborer avec des institutions am\u00e9ricaines op\u00e9rant dans l\u2019espionnage, c\u2019est, d\u2019apr\u00e8s Wired, la premi\u00e8re fois qu\u2019elle finance une startup de concert avec la CIA.<\/p>\n

\u00ab Personne n\u2019accuse Google de collaborer directement avec la CIA \u00bb, pr\u00e9cise le journaliste Noah Shachtman, sp\u00e9cialiste des questions de s\u00e9curit\u00e9 nationale pour le magazine, \u00ab mais ces investissements vont forc\u00e9ment nourrir des critiques contre Google, d\u00e9j\u00e0 nombreuses \u00e0 trouver le g\u00e9ant du web un peu trop proche du gouvernement am\u00e9ricain \u00bb. R\u00e9f\u00e9rence \u00e0 la proximit\u00e9 d\u2019Eric Schmidt, PDG de Google, et la Maison Blanche, ainsi qu\u2019au jeu de chaises musicales entre le personnel de l\u2019entreprise et l\u2019administration Obama.<\/p>\n

Google Ventures, charg\u00e9 de soutenir divers projets innovants, et In-Q-Tel, la firme investissant au nom des organisations du renseignement am\u00e9ricain, ont donc tout deux particip\u00e9 au financement de Recorded Future. Leurs montants respectifs ne sont pas connus, mais d\u00e9crits comme inf\u00e9rieurs \u00e0 10 millions de dollars chacun. Google l\u2019avait signal\u00e9 il y a plusieurs mois, tandis que In-Q-Tel l\u2019a discr\u00e8tement annonc\u00e9 r\u00e9cemment. Avec pareil conseil d\u2019administration et un tel domaine d\u2019activit\u00e9, Recorded Future, qui \u00e9dite par ailleurs le blog Analysis Intelligence, devrait atterrir dans le collimateur des anti-flicage sur le web et motiver de nouvelles campagnes de sensibilisation sur le traitement des donn\u00e9es personnelles.<\/p>\n

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\u00abRecorded Future\u00bb<\/a> (\u00abFutur Enregistr\u00e9\u00bb). Le nom semble tout droit sorti du film Minority Report<\/em> \u2013 la presse am\u00e9ricaine<\/a> ne se prive d’ailleurs pas de la r\u00e9f\u00e9rence. La r\u00e9alit\u00e9 est malgr\u00e9 tout un peu moins glamour. Ici, pas de mutants prescients flottant dans une baignoire: l’entreprise travaille simplement dans \u00abl’analyse pr\u00e9dictive\u00bb.<\/p>\n

Pour faire simple, elle passe \u00e0 la moulinette le web (sites d’infos, blogs, r\u00e9seaux sociaux<\/a> etc) et tente de mettre de l’ordre dans les \u00e9v\u00e9nements pass\u00e9s et pr\u00e9sents, de faire \u00e9merger des tendances, d’\u00e9tablir des connexions. Selon son patron, qui se confie au magazine Wired<\/a>, \u00abavec tous ces \u00e9l\u00e9ments, il est parfois possible de devancer les \u00e9v\u00e9nements\u00bb. Un peu \u00e0 l’imagine du FBI qui analyse le comportement d’un serial killer<\/em> pour tenter de pr\u00e9voir ses prochaines actions. Pour rester dans la m\u00e9taphore sortie du monde de la science-fiction, on est ici plus proche de la psycho-histoire invent\u00e9e par Isaac Asimov dans son cycle Fondation <\/em>que de l’esbroufe de Minority Report<\/em>.<\/p>\n

La police d\u00e9j\u00e0 cliente de syst\u00e8mes similaires
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Recorded Future travaille surtout sur des profils d’entreprises et dans la finance. Mais la firme se concentre \u00e9galement sur les actes de terrorisme. En analysant les \u00e9v\u00e9nements pass\u00e9s, elle peut par exemple tenter de d\u00e9terminer si une manifestation publique comporte de s\u00e9rieux risques. Aux Etats-Unis et en Angleterre, plusieurs bureaux de police utilisent d\u00e9j\u00e0 un logiciel \u00abd’analyse pr\u00e9dictive\u00bb mis au point par IBM<\/a>, afin de mieux d\u00e9cider quels effectifs d\u00e9ployer.<\/p>\n

Google et la CIA ont chacun investi 10 millions de dollars dans la start-up. Google, CIA, surveillance du web et pr\u00e9diction du futur dans la m\u00eame phrase, il n’en fallait pas plus pour alimenter les th\u00e9ories du complot. Il ne s’agit cependant pas d’un investissement commun mais bien s\u00e9par\u00e9. Google et la CIA ont cependant d\u00e9j\u00e0 travaill\u00e9 main dans la main par le pass\u00e9: l’entreprise de Mountain View a notamment fourni au renseignement am\u00e9ricain du mat\u00e9riel r\u00e9seau et avait demand\u00e9 l’aide de l’Agence lors de l’\u00e9pisode des cyber-attaques venues de Chine.<\/p>\n

Pour Google, voir les tendances \u00e9merger encore plus t\u00f4t que sur son Google Trends pourrait \u00eatre strat\u00e9gique pour un placement publicitaire encore plus pertinent. L’investissement dans Recorded Future est donc plut\u00f4t malin. C’\u00e9tait \u00e7a ou acheter Paul le Poulpe…<\/p>\n

Philippe Berry<\/a><\/div>\n
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The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time \u2014 and says it uses that information to predict the future.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine \u201cgoes beyond search<\/a>\u201d by \u201clooking at the \u2018invisible links\u2019 between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmomentum\u201d for any given event.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,\u201d says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.<\/p>\n

Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant\u2019s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel<\/a>, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the very first time Google has done business with America\u2019s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency<\/a> to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group<\/a>. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 \u2014 and then became the backbone for Google Earth.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cdon\u2019t be evil\u201d mantra.<\/p>\n

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America\u2019s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining \u201copen source intelligence\u201d \u2014 information that\u2019s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.<\/p>\n

\u201cSecret information isn\u2019t always the brass ring<\/a> in our profession,\u201d then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. \u201cIn fact, there\u2019s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.\u201d<\/p>\n

U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day<\/a>, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called \u201cunstructured text\u201d of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases<\/a>. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.<\/p>\n

Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened (\u201cspatial and temporal analysis\u201d) and the tone of the document (\u201csentiment analysis\u201d). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re right there as it happens,\u201d Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. \u201cWe can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah\u2019s long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah\u2019s past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres\u2019 accusations.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis<\/a>. But it\u2019s safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency\u2019s attention. In-Q-Tel doesn\u2019t make investments in firms without an \u201cend customer\u201d ready to test out that company\u2019s products.<\/p>\n

Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren\u2019t disclosed, but were under $10 million each.\u00a0Google\u2019s investment came to light earlier this year<\/a> online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment<\/a> a few weeks ago.<\/p>\n

Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future\u2019s board. Ahlberg says those board members have been \u201cvery helpful,\u201d providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it\u2019s safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg\u2019s last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.<\/p>\n

Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: \u201cWe are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT\u2019s portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn\u2019t mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google\u2019s critics \u2014 including conservative legal groups<\/a>, and Republican congressmen<\/a> \u2014 the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.<\/p>\n

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama\u2019s presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt<\/a>. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House\u2019s deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.<\/p>\n

In some corners, the scrutiny of the company\u2019s political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google\u2019s pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.<\/p>\n

But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers<\/a> from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks<\/a> as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)<\/p>\n

\u201cAssurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers\u2019 privacy because its corporate motto is \u2018don\u2019t be evil\u2019 have been shown by recent events such as the \u2018Wi-Spy\u2019 debacle to be unwarranted<\/a>,\u201d long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA\u2019s investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.<\/p>\n

But Steven Aftergood<\/a>, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn\u2019t worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard \u2014 from contracts to deliverables \u2014 I don\u2019t see a problem with it,\u201d he told Danger Room by e-mail. \u201cBut if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photo: AP\/Charles Dharapak<\/em><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recorded Future est une entreprise am\u00e9ricaine bas\u00e9e \u00e0 Boston dont les activit\u00e9s, sans \u00eatre fonci\u00e8rement surprenantes, ne manqueront pas d\u2019inspirer la m\u00e9fiance aux internautes, surtout quand on sait, gr\u00e2ce un article de Wired, que la CIA et Google ont tous deux investi dans la soci\u00e9t\u00e9. Son rayon d\u2019activit\u00e9 est le suivant : avec son autoproclam\u00e9 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-145","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-programmation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/algerienetwork.com\/sciences-tec\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}