Wired has a very interesting piece that will likely raise the eyebrows of Google critics. It is investing in a real-time web monitoring and trend spotting start-up at the same time as the CIA.

The firm is called Recorded Future and it basically searches the web to identify the relationships between people, groups, actions and events in order to predict both present and future occurrences.

Founded by CEO Christopher Ahlberg, (a former Swedish Army Ranger – there’s a Swedish army?) he put it like this: “We’re right there as it happens. We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

Google has, of course, done plenty of business with America’s secret services in the past — more than some critics would like. It worked with the National Security Agency to secure its networks and sold equipment to the CIA’s secret signals-intelligence group.

There is also the relationship between the investment arm of the CIA, In-Q-Tel, which backed the mapping firm Keyhole that was bought by Google in 2004 and helped create Google Earth.

Last year, In-Q-Tel formed a “strategic partnership and technology development agreement” with Visible Technologies, a company specialising in data-mining social-networking sites such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

The investment by In-Q-Tel was reported to be part of the CIA’s aim to use the “open source” information available on social networking sites.

There are clearly similarities between the two deals – both are about mining real-time data.

At the time Troy Pearsall, executive vice president of architecture and engineering at In-Q-Tel, said: “Its [Visible Technologies] platform delivers a clear and comprehensive view of complex information, integrating real-time data into a navigable and easy-to-use application that understands the context and tone of online dialogue.