Orwell's 1984 was not a How To manual, but it is increasingly being treated as one

Story in the Grauniad on the Social Media Tracking Big Data system built by Raytheon, ample demonstration of what the art (if that is the word) of the possible (see Guardian video above):

It's called RIOT and is an an "extreme-scale analytics" (Extreme data?) system created by Raytheon, a large US defence contractor, and gathers vast amounts of information about people from Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla and Foursquare, i.e it used different Social Media devices to cross collate individuals with different data, including the latitude and longitude co-ords in smartphones, and mashes it with Google Earth. The Grauniad notes that:

The technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing "trillions of entities" from cyberspace.

The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a "Google for spies" and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.

Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person's life – their friends, the places they visit charted on a map – in little more than a few clicks of a button.

Quite. And here is the future, imperfectly spread, in these vignettes of RIOT:

The Employee as Corporate property

"We're going to track one of our own employees," Urch says in the video, before bringing up pictures of "Nick," a Raytheon staff member used as an example target. With information gathered from social networks, Riot quickly reveals Nick frequently visits Washington Nationals Park, where on one occasion he snapped a photograph of himself posing with a blonde haired woman. "We know where Nick's going, we know what Nick looks like," Urch explains, "now we want to try to predict where he may be in the future."

Digital Stalking Made Easy

The video shows that Nick, who posts his location regularly on Foursquare, visits a gym frequently at 6am early each week. Urch quips: "So if you ever did want to try to get hold of Nick, or maybe get hold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6am on a Monday."

Big Brother

Mining from public websites for law enforcement is considered legal in most countries. In February last year, for instance, the FBI requested help to develop a social-media mining application for monitoring "bad actors or groups".

Underlying all this is the issue that most people don't have a clue about what is really possible with Big Data. Ginger McCall, an attorney at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Centre:

"Social networking sites are often not transparent about what information is shared and how it is shared," McCall said. "Users may be posting information that they believe will be viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by government officials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search."

Add to this the developents in automatic face recognition software, and you start to see Big Brother's face emerging from the matrix.

But, we have been consistently over-optimistic when we have predicted people will start to realise what these systems can do, but we seem to way over estimate user concern for privacy. Maybe it's one of these things that has a slow fuse, and then one particular episode ignites it (like Millie Dowler in the phone-hacking cases). In which case, can we predict a riot at that point?