The intelligence community has seen the future, and the future is Google Trends. Actually, more like a highly sophisticated version of Google Trends, with Twitter and YouTube thrown in for good measure.
Iarpa, the blue-sky research arm of the intelligence community, recently announced a new program that aims to monitor, collect and analyze publicly available data to predict future events. The Open Source Indicator Program would be so sensitive to changes in the zeitgeist that it could “beat the news,” anticipating “political crises, disease outbreaks, economic instability, resource shortages and natural disasters” — to name a few.
The idea that web search trends, blogs, internet traffic and webcams could hint at the future is nothing new. Google Flu Trends was set up in 2009 to predict flu outbreaks, counting on the fact that hordes of people searching for “flu symptoms” might mean something. In some cases Google was faster than the government at identifying where the next outbreak would occur.
Read More: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/spies-tweets-tsunami
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