If
possible, IARPA's program seeks to fix that. "Our focus is to beat the
news with greater accuracy and to do it faster by combining [various
sets of] data, and we are seeing that it is possible," Jason Matheny,
program manager of the Open Source Indicators Program, told Bloomberg Business Week in February of this year.
The
privacy of the users whose information is being culled for this
predictive analytics program could be a controversial issue.
Naren Ramakrishnan, a Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech who
heads up the pilot NSA program told the Wall Street Journal
in June that his research team was trying to protect the privacy of
people even while they collected this data. "In the case of civil
unrest, we haven't come to the point of modeling government opposition
groups," he said. Ramakrishnan explained that they seek to predict when a
protest might happen, but not who would be participating in it.
But after Snowden's leaks regarding Washington's indiscriminate spying, many experts have raised concerns that this program will violate personal rights and privacy as well.
American
University's Albro said that a "viable, ethical framework on how to
collect data from social media" and protect privacy still needs to be
developed and articulated for research purposes in general.
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