CIA’s spy tools make Maxwell Smart’s look like toys

May 28, 2004 | Source: USA Today

The CIA’s future information analysis technologies will make Google look like a toy. In-Q-Tel’s investments provide a glimpse of what they might do.

  • Tacit Knowledge Systems’ software could facilitate information sharing by scanning every agent’s outgoing e-mail, looking for clusters of words that tell the system what and who each agent seems to know. And MetaCarta can figure out where the information is about.
  • PiXlogic can search photos or videos for certain shapes or facial features.
  • Systems Research & Development’s Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness sorts through vast amounts of information to find the tiniest hints of collusion.
  • UCLA’s Language Weaver technology is a new approach to machine translation, based on statistical models.
  • Dust Networks’ smart dust sensors, dropped in enemy territory, could detect troop movements.