Speaking of the pentagon, this is not good news. The website has clickable links in the article for more info. Interesting how they call non-violent movements "contagions".

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown

Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown
Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

Pentagon Building in Washington
The Pentagon is funding social science research to model risks of "social contagions" that could damage US strategic interests.

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:

"In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."

The project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."

I contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no response.

Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how "radical causes" promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national security threat of interest to the DoD.

Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press office:

"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State University.

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be integrated with operations."

Although Office of Naval Research supervisor Dr Harold Hawkins had assured the university researchers at the outset that the project was merely "a basic research effort, so we shouldn't be concerned about doing applied stuff", the meeting in fact showed that DoD is looking to "feed results" into "applications," Corman said in the email. He advised his researchers to "think about shaping results, reports, etc., so they [DoD] can clearly see their application for tools that can be taken to the field."

Many independent scholars are critical of what they see as the US government's efforts to militarise social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government noting that the Pentagon lacks "the kind of infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research" in a way that involves "rigorous, balanced and objective peer review", calling for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The following month, the DoD signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the NSF to cooperate on the management of Minerva. In response, the AAA cautioned that although research proposals would now be evaluated by NSF's merit-review panels. "Pentagon officials will have decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels":

"… there remain concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded when it supports the Pentagon's agenda. Other critics of the programme, including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the programme would discourage research in other important areas and undermine the role of the university as a place for independent discussion and critique of the military."

According to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, "when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project."

Prof Price has previously exposed how the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme - designed to embed social scientists in military field operations - routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions "within the United States."

Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios "adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order."

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to "identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York, concurs with Price's concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the "study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements," he said, including how "to counteract grassroots movements."

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter @nafeezahmed.

NardDogNation wrote:This **** is terrifying. But the government has been doing stuff like this for years albeit on a smaller scale both domestically and internationally, during the Cold War. It's why I laugh at these 2nd amendment idiots that think their gun is somehow going to protect them and/or act as a counterweight to a tyrannical government.

Yup, Cointelpro, TIA, FBI investigating groups and putting in plants, NYPD as well. Its not new, but you're right they are breaking new ground when it comes to how far they will go to prevent even the most peaceful movements from gaining momentum. They work for Wall Street, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised. I've read pieces from political writers and economists who aren't conspiracy theorist or radicals by any means who say if the status quo doesn't change soon there will be some kind of revolution in the next ten years. The pentagon is planning for it because their masters have no intention of helping create a more equitable society.

Here is a piece about this subject from one of the best blogs out there IMO. One worth bookmarking if you haven't already Nardog. The man who runs it covers lots of different issues with a great deal of research. Its quite impressive.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/fourth-turning-accelerating.html

Unless you belong to organizations that the govt doesnt like I wouldnt worry about it. They have bigger fish to fry.

What you and I have talked about over the last few months is the same kind of things you will find on this blog.

jrodmc wrote:So we're just going to send advisors and special forces into Iraq...hmmmmm, where have I heard this before?
The era or error of US hegemony is apparently and definitively over with this administration.

Thoughts?

My thoughts are that I am surprise this didn't get posted in the Knick forum with an OT in the title - good for you for not pulling that stupid ****!

As for Iraq - I'd just blow the place to pieces along with Afghanistan.

GustavBahler wrote:Looks like congress is finally starting to wake up on this issue....

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/06/20-3

Published on Friday, June 20, 2014 by Common Dreams
House Moves to Rein in NSA 'Backdoor' Spying on Americans
Passage of Massie amendment cheered by privacy advocates as step towards curbing surveillance abuses
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

The House of Representatives on Thursday approved an effort to rein in government surveillance by passing an amendment that attempts to block so-called "backdoor" searches by the NSA.

The late night vote on the amendment, whose main sponsor was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), passed 293-123 with overwhelming bipartisan support and little debate.

Massie and amendment co-sponsors Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) called their proposal "a sure step toward shutting the back door on mass surveillance," and stated that it would "reinstate an important provision that was stripped from the original USA FREEDOM Act to further protect the Constitutional rights of American citizens. Congress has an ongoing obligation to conduct oversight of the intelligence community and its surveillance authorities."

Specifically, the amendment to the 2015 Department of Defense Appropriations Act would "prohibit use of funds by an officer or employee of the United States to query a collection of foreign intelligence information acquired under FISA using a United States person identifier except in specified instances."

In other words, as a group of privacy advocates and tech companies wrote in a letter (pdf) to House members,

the amendment would address the “backdoor search loophole” by prohibiting the use of appropriated funds to enable government agencies to collect and search the communications of U.S. persons without a warrant using section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (50 U.S. C. 1881a), a statute primarily designed to pick up communications of individuals abroad. Although section 702 prohibits the government from intentionally targeting the communications of U.S. persons, it does not impose restrictions on querying those communications if they were inadvertently or incidentally collected under section 702. Moreover, as a result of an apparent change in the NSA’s internal practices in 2011, the NSA is now explicitly permitted under certain circumstances to conduct searches using U.S. person names and identifiers without a warrant.

The amendment would block the Defense Appropriations Bill from funding the NSA to conduct this kind of backdoor search.

Mike Masnick writes at Techdirt that the vote marks

the first time that Congress has overwhelmingly voted to defund an NSA program. Last year's Amash Amendment came very, very close to defunding a different program (the Section 215 bulk records collection program), but by passing by an overwhelming margin, this vote is a pretty big sign that the House (on both sides of the aisle) is not happy with how the NSA has been spying on Americans. [...] it's also a big slap in the face to the White House and certain members of the House leadership who conspired to water down the USA Freedom Act a few weeks ago, stripping it of a very similar provision to block backdoor searches.

EFF said the vote marked "a great day in the fight to rein in NSA surveillance abuses." Mark Rumold, staff attorney fir EFF, said in a statement:

The House voted overwhelmingly to cut funding for two of the NSA's invasive surveillance practices: the warrantless searching of Americans' international communications, and the practice of requiring companies to install vulnerabilities in communications products or services. We applaud the House for taking this important first step, and we look forward to other elected officials standing up for our right to privacy.

Fight for the Future, which also supported the amendment, cheered the vote's passage, tweeting on Friday:

We did it!!! Amendments to DoD Appropriations bill passed overwhelmingly. The tides are turning and Congress is scared. #NSA, you're losing!
— Fight for the Future (@fightfortheftr) June 20, 2014

I'm always skeptical of these types of things. It feels more like a show to me than anything else. A little dust gets kicked up that the powers that be don't want the public to know and then these hearings act as a kind of pacifier. But when USS Maine was blown up in Havana Bay, did Americans become more skeptical of false flag operations? What about the assassination of world leader after world leader to pave the way for "American interests" in resource rich countries? What about the massive amounts of evidence of the government harming "undesirables" who were still American citizens e.g. cointelpro, the Iran-contra scandal, etc.? These things never stop; they just mature and become more expansive. Nothings going to change through these hearings; they'll just get more clever in hiding what they do. Diana Feinstein and the like are just a little butthurt about thinking they were the exception to getting spied on.

GustavBahler wrote:

NardDogNation wrote:

GustavBahler wrote:If you have a PC try Ghostery with firefox, stops a lot of tracking. Try a VPN if you have an ipad or smartphone.

Unless you belong to organizations that the govt doesnt like I wouldnt worry about it. They have bigger fish to fry.

What you and I have talked about over the last few months is the same kind of things you will find on this blog.

I suppose I'm a little paranoid. They use to say that technology is usually in the field 20 or so years before they're disseminated to the public. Considering how far we've come, is it really that hard to develop an apparatus capable of doing what I suggested? We know their looking at all metadata. Is it really that hard to take the next step, with an unlimited budget and resources to work with? I use to look at those types of blogs as well...then I started getting these weird ghost texts and system slowdowns. Even after going on a hiatus, it takes me 10-30 minutes to receive emails. Like I said, I might be a little bit paranoid but history shows that those with that kind of power will inevitably abuse it.

They farm some of their data collection activity to private companies I believe, that's why I didn't say that it stops all tracking, they have their own capabilities of course. Its good to have it anyway to make it harder for private companies to keep a dossier on you that they can sell to whoever they want, including the govt. I would be more concerned with that right now.

You can type from a list of hundreds of words or phrases to get their attention. Most are rather innocuous. More than likely the political discussions we've all had on this board have already been monitored. I'm of the opinion that we've already crossed that bridge, but I can understand why you would be concerned.

We haven't advocated violence in any fashion, just reading tea leaves here and expressing our disappointment with the direction our country has taken over the last decade or so. You can read the same thing we've written about in the mainstream media, mainstream internet websites. Nothing radical or revolutionary. Actually most of what we talk about is how it used to be in some form. We aren't trying to reinvent the wheel here, just hoping we get back some of what we have lost as a country.

Sorry about the delay. I forgot about this conversation in the midst of the Tyson Chandler trade, etc. But while what you say is true, I don't think it takes into account the perception of the kinds of people that work in the security industry and how they define a "threat".

I went to an alma mater that was a breeding ground for our nation's intelligence/defense agencies. One of my brother's grandfather was head of the CIA. David Patreus has several relatives that are alumni/students. We've even graduated a Secretary of Defense. My sophomore year roommate's dad, also an alum, was a ranking officer in the CIA (never found out what he explicitly does though). My roommate himself, has now gone on to work for the DOD as well as 3 of my other housemates. Hell, even I was in ROTC for a very short stint (and ****ing hated it). Of the 25 or so people I had a working relationship with (mostly MS1's and MS2's), I only know of 7 people (one artillery, one chaplain, one infantry, one Apache helicopter pilot, two air assault) that didn't go military intelligence.

The point is that I use to have connections to that world and one of the common themes that emerges is their complete and utter disdain of anything or anyone progressive. And personally, I think that it rises to the level of them considering it to be so alien to what they define as "the American Experience" that they'll define it as being a threat. Granted, this is largely based on my experiences in ROTC, a very limited subset of that community, it left me with the impression that it is far more pervasive and includes the types of people that are in decision making positions (because of the lineage factor). And this came while being at a liberal arts school. I can't even imagine what military schools like West Point and Annapolis would breed.