Refining Upstream Inelligence
Modern Upstream Intelligence operates under the assumption that UI possesses monetary value, and can be bought and sold through appropriate parties. These appropriate parties are known as refineries, though currently in development, buy massive sets of data from suppliers, use algorithms to correlate and weight data, then sell refined UI to government or NFP(not for profit) groups. The refinery's goal is to get as many diverse and overlapping data sets as possible to have redundancy and resilience in their end product. Datasets are bought from all sorts of sources: ISPs, Security product vendors, Open source groups, ISACs (Information sharing and analysis centers), Search engines (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo), and even Web applications (Facebook, Stumble). So protect yourself people! Because there is alot of data aggregation out there! But also consider this, there is alot of money to be made within the refinery industry. This information can be used to aid the security industry, as well as governments, and open source groups. There is alot of money there, one just needs some initiative and some visualization experience. Remember, redundancy and a wide collection group are key to refining Upstream Intelligence.