Here's How U.S. Spies Will Find You Through Your Pics

Iarpa, the intelligence community's way-out research shop, wants to know where you took that vacation picture over the Fourth of July. It wants to know where you took that snapshot with your friends when you were at that New Year's Eve party. Oh yeah, and if you happen to be a terrorist and you took a photo with some of your buddies while prepping for a raid, the agency definitely wants to know where you took that picture — and it's looking for ideas to help figure it out. In an announcement for its new "Finder" program, the agency says that it is looking for ways to geolocate (a fancy word for "locate" that implies having coordinates for a place) images by extracting data from the images themselves and using this to make guesses about where they were taken. ... And you better believe that it's not just spooks who want to know where images were taken. Google, Facebook, Apple and all the other internet and social media giants are probably looking to do the same thing so that they can better understand where their users are and what they are doing there. So before long your Facebook or Google+ account will be automatically tagging who is in your pictures and where they were taken… …and spooks might be, too.