Recorded Future is a "cybersecurity" firm headquartered in Somerville MA, which is involved in the broad-scale online surveillance of millions of individuals worldwide. According to their website, "Recorded Future works with more than 1,300 businesses and government organizations across 60 countries." Recorded Future's clients include corporate giants like Google, US federal agencies like the CIA, as well as the Israeli government.
As reported by WIRED.com:
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time – and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents – both present and still-to-come.
The same article from WIRED.com elaborates on the chilling nature of practices Recorded Future utilizes to obtain this intel on its targets:
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened ("spatial and temporal analysis") and the tone of the document ("sentiment analysis"). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web. "We're right there as it happens," Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. "We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people."
The WIRED.com article further notes that along with its collaboration with the CIA, Recorded Future has offered its services to Israel intelligence, surveilling and collecting intel on the Lebanese resistance faction (and declared enemy of the Israeli state) Hezbollah:
Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah's long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres' accusations.
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As reported by WIRED.com:
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time – and says it uses that information to predict the future. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents – both present and still-to-come.
Recorded Future partners with Microsoft to provide intelligence integration services.
Recorded Future partners with Amazon to provide "threat identification and remediation" services.
Recorded Future partners with IBM to provide intelligence integration services.
The "cybersecurity firm" Recorded Future has received $246,486 to date from contracts with the US Department of Homeland Security.
The "cybersecurity firm" Recorded Future has received contracts from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).