Software Lets Governments Track People Via Social Media

Creepy and tweetable

You might want to watch the video below before you check in, update your status, or snap and share that photo of you at lunch with your smartphone.

The Guardian got hold of this 2010 video demonstration from Raytheon, a big-time contractor that also develops things like missile systems for the Department of Defense, which shows an online tracking tool called Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or RIOT.

As Raytheon's Brian Urch explains in the video, the system takes in data about an individual from social networks including Facebook, FourSquare and GoWalla (remember, it's late 2010 in the video), maps it using Google Earth and analyzes the location information to figure out where a person has been and what that person's routines are, and even to predict where someone might be at a certain time.