How Spies May One Day Predict The Future

• http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/06/10/how-spies-may-one-day-predict-the-future/

Rachael King

Reporter

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, a little-known U.S. government organization, is developing analytic programs for the National Security Agency that could make recent revelations about the NSA’s activities look antiquated by comparison. Rather than reviewing archival data, it may use current data to predict the future.
IARPA is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops new technology for the military. “IARPA does for NSA what DARPA does for the military,” said James A. Lewis, director and senior fellow of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “A lot of their programs are black,” he told CIO Journal, meaning that they’re classified and funded from a classified budget. 
Certain of its programs are not classified. One such program is Open Source Indicators, which reviews a range of publicly available sources, such as Tweets, Web queries, oil prices and daily stock market activity, to gauge the likelihood of certain “significant societal events,” according to a program announcement posted on FedBizOpps.gov. The goal of the program is to develop continuously automated systems that use information from these sources to predict when and where a disease outbreak, riot, political crisis or mass violence might occur. Currently, the project is focusing on events in Latin America. IARPA did not respond to requests for comment. 
It may sound like a far-fetched idea, but already that project has correctly predicted events, days in advance. For example, researchers were able to accurately forecast sudden protests that occurred in Paraguay when the president was impeached, said Naren Ramakrishnan, the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech. 
Mr. Ramakrishnan is leading a team of about 60 people from the University of Maryland, Cornell University, Children’s Hospital of Boston, San Diego State University, University of California at San Diego and Indiana University and two companies CACI International Inc. and Basis Technology. The team can earn up to $13.3 million if it’s funded over the full three-year term of the project.
The project was also able to accurately predict a Hantavirus outbreak in Argentina last year, said Mr. Ramakrishnan. The team is trying to find which pieces of data most accurately forecast an outbreak. For example, project team members are looking at the numbers of cars parked in hospital parking lots from satellite images and trying to figure out if an increased number of cars in the parking lot can be an early indication of an increase in disease outbreak, he said. IARPA keeps a log of all the predictions forecast by researchers and checks them against articles in local newspapers to determine which ones were accurate. Each month, his group gets a report card from IARPA telling the researchers how well they performed.
Mr. Ramakrishnan says his researchers are trying to preserve individual privacy as they create their algorithms to mine this data. “In the case of civil unrest, we haven’t come to the point of modeling government opposition groups,” he said. His group is trying to predict when and where a protest might occur, but not the individuals who are participating in that protest. But Mr. Ramakrishnan acknowledges that somebody could potentially use this information in ways that are not intended.