{"id":35579,"date":"2013-10-28T12:00:27","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T12:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=35579"},"modified":"2015-05-05T22:21:18","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T21:21:18","slug":"big-brothers-new-crystal-ball-washington-develops-online-data-mining-program-to-predict-global-political-unrest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/10\/big-brothers-new-crystal-ball-washington-develops-online-data-mining-program-to-predict-global-political-unrest\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Brother\u2019s New Crystal Ball: Washington Develops Online Data Mining Program to Predict Global Political Unrest"},"content":{"rendered":"

The outrage regarding Washington\u2019s National Security Agency spying, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has spread across the world, upsetting diplomatic relations and threatening to shift balances of global power. Yet beyond this spying network lies another, lesser known pilot operation within the NSA called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity\u2019s Open Source Indicators Program<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This initiative involves academics working at the behest of a research branch of the NSA who are using US government-collected online data to actually predict future events, such as political protests, pandemics, and economic crises\u2014with a focus on Latin America.<\/p>\n

This sci-fi\u00a0type project to create an intelligence \u201ccrystal ball\u201d seeks to develop automated analytics programs using open source information such as\u00a0Facebook, Tweets, Google searches, and other publicly-accessible data in order to stay one step ahead of current events.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think citizens in other countries are already worried,\u201d said Robert\u00a0Albro, Associate Research Professor at American University\u2019s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. \u201cWhile, so far as I\u2019m aware, the details of the IARPA\u2019s Open Source Indicators Program are not widely-known in Latin America at present, programs of this sort will be understood in the political and diplomatic context of the recent post-Snowden\u00a0revelations about NSA cyber-espionage in the region, particularly with respect to both Mexico and Brazil.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a recent gathering at the United Nations, a united group of Latin American presidents confronted the Obama administration<\/a> about its spying operations in the region, denouncing this affront to regional sovereignty. But the new IARPA program extends these unpopular spying efforts in a new direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal that\u00a0IARPA\u00a0has is to eventually transition this to the intelligence community, and use it for something like the National Intelligence Estimates,\u201d Jenn Carter, who works on the project, told the BBC<\/a> last year. <\/b>National Intelligence Estimates are US government intelligence reports on national security issues that predict future events.<\/p>\n

One so-called success story of the new Open Source Indicators Program, as reported in The Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a> on\u00a0September 10th\u00a0by Rachel King, involves a team of university academics and representatives from the private sector which \u201cforecasted several protests in Brazil\u201d for the South American nation\u2019s independence day. The same team, writes King, also successfully forecasted protests in Paraguay after the 2012 coup against President Fernando Lugo<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Albro\u00a0was dubious of the program\u2019s revelations on the Brazil protests, calling it a \u201cdrinking the\u00a0kool-aid moment,\u201d where the project\u2019s supporters will use this alleged success to reinforce their beliefs about the project\u2019s viability.<\/p>\n

David Price, a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Justice at Saint Martin\u2019s University shares a similar sentiment. \u201cI am extremely skeptical that these sort of planes of prediction will work out the way they want them to,\u201d he said. \u201cHowever, I understand why those in power who want to know what\u2019s going on in the world, and want to manipulate it, are so interested in this.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US intelligence community has come under fire over the last dozen years for failures to predict major events, from 9\/11 and the Iraq War to the Arab Spring. One notable critique emerged in a February 2011 Senate hearing, when Dianne\u00a0Feinstein\u00a0(D-Calif.) said that, in regards to the upheaval in Egypt<\/a>, \u201cshe was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on\u00a0Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government.\u201d<\/p>\n

If possible, IARPA\u2019s program seeks to fix that. \u201cOur focus is to beat the news with greater accuracy and to do it faster by combining [various sets of] data, and we are seeing that it is possible,\u201d\u00a0Jason\u00a0Matheny, program manager of the Open Source Indicators Program, told Bloomberg\u00a0Business Week <\/a>in February of this year.<\/p>\n

The privacy of the users whose information is being culled for this predictive analytics program could be a controversial issue. Naren\u00a0Ramakrishnan, a Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech who heads up the pilot NSA program told the Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a> in June that his research team was trying to protect the privacy of people even while they collected this data. \u201cIn the case of civil unrest, we haven\u2019t come to the point of modeling government opposition groups,\u201d he said. Ramakrishnan explained that they seek to predict when a protest might happen, but not who would be participating in it.<\/p>\n

But after Snowden\u2019s leaks regarding Washington\u2019s indiscriminate spying, many experts have raised concerns that this program will violate personal rights and privacy as well.<\/p>\n

American University\u2019s\u00a0Albro\u00a0said that a \u201cviable, ethical framework on how\u00a0to collect data from social media\u201d and protect privacy still needs to be developed and articulated for research purposes in general.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should all be worried,\u201d said anthropology Professor David Price, also the author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State<\/i><\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be used domestically, I imagine, as much as it is going to be used internationally.\u201d<\/p>\n

Price, a critic of academics\u2019 collaboration with the Pentagon for its\u00a0Human Terrain System<\/a> in Iraq and Afghanistan, which involves social scientists providing the military with information on the local people and culture where troops are deployed, none-the-less thinks open source intelligence can potentially be very useful in preventing disasters.<\/p>\n

However, he explained, \u201cI don\u2019t see them wanting to predict and prevent things like famine, but rather they want to figure out ways to support regimes which support American interests as part of a larger political program we should all be worried about.\u201d<\/p>\n

____________________<\/p>\n

Cyril Mychalejko is an editor at\u00a0www.UpsideDownWorld.org<\/a>, an online magazine covering politics and activism in Latin America.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 towardfreedom.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This initiative involves academics working at the behest of a research branch of the NSA who are using US government-collected online data to actually predict future events, such as political protests, pandemics, and economic crises\u2014with a focus on Latin America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35579\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}