MetaCarta

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Wed Feb 4 06:39:06 PST 2004


 ip2location (which is surprisingly accurate) on steroids.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3430987.stm Spooks turn to hi-tech
geography By Alfred Hermida BBC News Online technology editor Imagine
being able to pinpoint someone's location anywhere in the world simply by
typing a few keywords on your PC. That is what software partly funded by
the US military is trying to do. The MetaCarta program works by analysing
thousands of documents and cross-checking the results with a massive
geographical database. So far it has largely been used by US intelligence
agencies to analyse the huge amount of information collected as part of
the war on terror. "The government and international security agencies
have a desire to find, track and sometimes arrest people," said Randy
Ridley, MetaCarta's Vice President of Sales. "Our system can be used to
find them across the globe." "Perhaps it could be used to find Osama Bin
Laden by checking out various aspects of Afghanistan and other parts of
the world where we think he might be and see if there is a lot of data
that supports a potential presence," he told BBC News Online. Patterns of
activity The company behind the software was founded in 1999 by
researchers from the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It
received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and
the investment arm of the CIA to develop its MetaCarta Geographic Text
Search program. In three to four years we expect this software to be
ubiquitous, something that everybody has to use to do their work Randy
Ridley, MetaCarta The software automatically extracts geographic
references from text documents such as e-mails or webpages. Millions of
documents can be searched using keywords, place names or a time
reference. Search results appear as points on a map instead of as a list
of documents. The company says this information can be used, for example,
to track patterns of criminal activity and identify spots of intensity.
The software relies on the reliability of the documents searched. But the
program tries to take account of some of these factors by making sure it
has found the right location. This can be particularly tricky in the
Middle East, where many place names are the same as a person's name. To
counter this, the MetaCarta software uses an AI process to make sense of
the geographical information, rating the results on a probability factor.
'Ubiquitous' software The company sees its product as giving the
intelligence community an edge in providing timely and reliable analysis
of mountains of data. "Government agencies have information archived,
streaming in," said Mr Ridley. "We estimate that there is roughly 1,000
to one or 10,000 to one productivity advantage over a human doing it
manually, depending on the process." "In three to four years we expect
this software to be ubiquitous," he added, "something that everybody has
to use to do their work." Since September 11, US security agencies have
increasingly turned to technology to help them process website postings,
internet chat and e-mail traffic. MetaCarta was exhibiting its technology
at the recent Government Convention on Emerging Technologies in Las
Vegas, which showcases hi-tech products developed for use in the fight
against terror. Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3430987.stm Published:
2004/01/30 09:04:35 GMT -- Eugen* Leitl leitl
______________________________________________________________ ICBM:
48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014
B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org
http://nanomachines.net

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list