‘Google for spies’ software tracks social media habits – and predicts future behaviour

Defence firm’s Riot program mines social network data, drawing ire from civil rights groups

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Raytheon's 'principal investigator' Brian Urch explains how the Rapid Information Overlay Technology (Riot) software works in this still

Published: 1:30pm, 11 Feb 2013Updated: 1:31pm, 11 Feb 2013

A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.

A video obtained by the Guardian in London reveals how an “extreme-scale analytics” system created by Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.

Raytheon says it has not sold the software - named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology - to any clients. But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.

The power of Riot to harness websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.

Using Riot it is possible to gain a picture of a person’s life - their friends, the places they visit charted on a map - in little more than a few clicks of a button.