RIOT is a database application that aggregates information extracted from ingress.com/intel and agent scanner data and makes it available for agents to search.

The technique of harvesting data in this fashion is called scraping. This is a violation of the Ingress Terms of Service

The Ingress Terms of Service prohibit the use of “automation software, bots, spiders, crawlers, data mining tools, or hacks, tools, agents, engines, or devices of any kind” to “extract, scrape, or index the Services or Content (including information about users or game play)”.

Access to and maintenance of the RIOT database is centralized within a Slack team called The Brokers Guild. Using this Slack and automation tools, authorized agents can find in seconds:

all the portals belonging to a specified agent, including capture dates

the longest-held portals for a given region

heatmaps of agents’ activity, including home portals and frequently visited portals

agents’ Ingress start dates

An additional function called RADAR enables agents to receive automated real time alerts on intel triggers, such as:

links over 20km thrown within 30 minutes of checkpoints

mod deployment, notably VRLA

enemy agents acting outside their predefined home area

Authorized agents also have access to an application called Omnivore, which allows them to launch bot interfaces elsewhere to further propagate this scraped data.

While this particular group has been in operation since October of 2015, the underlying service and database have been active for over 3 years.

790 Resistance agents across the world, including Niantic employees, Vanguards, and anomaly POCs, currently have access to these features directly. There is no way to know how many other agents interact with the bots they administer, but it is estimated to be in the thousands.

Here are some examples. Click on an image to enlarge:

For an example of the whole system in action please see Anatomy of a Hit

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