RecordedFuture, at first glance, is scary. It’s one of those projects that brings the saying “with great power comes great responsibility” to mind. The company has developed a platform for providing momentum and sentiment ratings around two conceptual abstractions: events & entities. Its system is continually scanning “thousands of high-quality new publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial database, and more,” then making that available via the Recorded Future News Analytics API. This type of news aggregation and processing is a level of awareness that no single human could otherwise obtain. From a theoretical perspective, having a tool such as this at one’s disposal would create a huge information advantage. Could this be called an information weapon?
