The CIA Is Investing in Firms That Mine Your Tweets and Instagram Photos (opens in new tab)

They use existing IED locations and layers of GIS data to determine where terrorists would be likely to place them. For instance, they use events as training data and then measure distance to light posts, distance from school, distance from whatever to create heat maps of high risk IED areas. The problem is the terrorists algorithm changes as we get better at stopping them. Cat and mouse.

Here's one of the shell companies:

http://www.strategiclinkpartners.com/

You could argue that while they don't have police authority, they do do police work.

Uh...yeah. They are.

You all hate belgium and paris and mumbai and lower manhattan attacks...but...don't want to accept the reality of what it takes to prevent them.

You can't have it both ways. You know you can't....all you can hope is for better regulation.

They're more like Team America - World Police