The Central Intelligence Agency supports companies developing artificial intelligence to decipher patterns among social media platforms
According to a recent report released by The Intercept, the CIA has already invested significant capital in the services of 38 companies specializing in analyzing social media data and interpreting valuable posting patterns.
The investments are due to help the law enforcement services and also predict and prevent the on-line organizing of violent protests, riots or conflicts of any kind, by providing important security-related information.
“ISIL’s tweets and other social media messages publicizing their activities often produce information that, especially in the aggregate, provides real intelligence value,” CIA’s second-in-command David Cohen declared.
The companies that monitor the virtual platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, are mostly startups. Among them, Dataminr, PATHAR and Geofeedia daily process a huge amount of data by using special application program interfaces or geotagging protocol.
The contracts between the appointed firms and the federal government are public and sum-up almost $800.000.
