{"id":46547,"date":"2014-08-25T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=46547"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:42","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:42","slug":"pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-to-track-and-kill-activists-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/08\/pentagon-funds-new-data-mining-tools-to-track-and-kill-activists-part-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon Funds New Data-Mining Tools to Track and Kill Activists (Part III)"},"content":{"rendered":"

20 Aug 2014 – This is the third of a four-part investigative series about U.S. Defense-funded programs to spy on activists and Muslims worldwide. <\/em><\/p>\n

Read Part I HERE<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and Part II\u00a0HERE<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The U.S. Department of Defense’s multimillion dollar university\u00a0research program<\/a>, the Minerva Research Initiative, is developing new data mining and analysis tools for the U.S. military intelligence community to capture and analyze social media posts. The new tools provide unprecedented techniques to identify individuals engaged in political radicalism around the world, while mapping their behavioral patterns and social or organizational connections and affiliations.<\/p>\n

The range of research projects undertaken by Arizona State University (ASU), a National Security Agency (NSA)-designated university, includes the development of algorithms which leading intelligence experts agree could directly input into the notorious “kill lists” \u2013 enhancing the intelligence community\u2019s ability to identify groups suspected of terrorist activity for potential targeting via the CIA\u2019s extrajudicial “signature” drone strikes.<\/p>\n

\"gchq-spying<\/a><\/p>\n

Through the Social Media Looking Glass<\/strong><\/p>\n

One Pentagon-sponsored ASU project whose\u00a0findings were published<\/a>\u00a0by the Social Network Analysis and Mining journal in 2012 involved downloading and cataloging 37,000 articles from 2005 to 2011 from the websites of 23 Indonesian religious organizations to \u201cprofile their ideology and activity patterns along a hypothesized radical\/counter-radical scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

This study also found that the automated threat-classification model successfully ranked the organizations with \u201cexpert-level accuracy.\u201d Related research has focused on developing data-mining and analytical tools to track political trends and social movements via social media.<\/p>\n

According to Minerva chief Erin Fitzgerald, such research is about minimizing conflict. \u201cInsights generated from Minerva research are intended to inform more effective strategic and operational policy decisions by defense leadership,” said Fitzgerald. “The end goal is always to prevent future conflict and \u2013 if the U.S. must play a role in conflict elsewhere \u2013 to help DoD understand how to most effectively engage with partners to mitigate that conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long before Edward Snowden\u2019s revelations about NSA surveillance programs, it has been known that the\u00a0CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies<\/a>\u00a0have actively sought to analyze social media, from blogposts to tweets and from Amazon reviews to YouTube clips and Flickr photos. The NSA\u2019s\u00a0Open Source Indicators Program<\/a>, for instance, involves \u201cacademics who work at a research branch of the NSA\u201d developing automated analytical tools that mine open source information on Facebook, Twitter, Google and elsewhere to predict future events such as protests, pandemics, resource shortages, mass migrations, and economic crises.<\/p>\n

Such open source information is also already being used as \u201cenrichment\u201d data\u00a0to be integrated<\/a>\u00a0with phone and email metadata to create sophisticated graphs identifying the social connections, associates, locations, traveling companions and other patterns of behavior of individuals seen as potential \u201cradicals\u201d or terrorists \u2013 whether American or foreign.<\/p>\n

This analytical capability is directly mobilized to identify not just potential extremists and their associations, but also to pursue and sanction “high-value targets.” In one case in 2012, according to the\u00a0Washington Post<\/a>, \u201ca user account on a social media Web site provided an instant portal to an al-Qaeda operative\u2019s hard drive.\u201d A leaked NSA document confirmed: \u201cWithin minutes, we successfully exploited the target.\u201d<\/p>\n

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which generates the CIA\u2019s kill lists, draws its information from databases across the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, CIA, NSA and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), among others, encompassing and integrating both metadata from private electronic communications and associated data across an individual\u2019s online social media networks.<\/p>\n

DHS fusion centers, working closely with private sector corporations,\u00a0routinely data-mine social media posts of American citizens<\/a>\u00a0including, for instance, Occupy activists in efforts to detect threat trends that could constitute a \u201chazard\u201d to the public.<\/p>\n

According to a classified criteria, names of potential \u201cradicals\u201d outside the U.S. linked to terrorist groups or activity are\u00a0canvassed by the NCTC<\/a>\u00a0for potential extrajudicial assassination, and assessed by a White House interagency commission, which narrows them down before a presidential decision as to whether each individual lives or dies.<\/p>\n

The problem, according to ASU researchers writing in a separate 2013 paper, is that current technology \u201ccannot find the proverbial \u2018needles in a haystack\u2019 corresponding to those individuals with radical or extremist ideas, connect the dots to identify their relationships, and their socio-cultural, political, economic drivers.\u201d<\/p>\n

This has led the Pentagon to fund the ASU to create a technology dubbed\u00a0“LookingGlass,”<\/a>\u00a0\u201ca visual intelligence platform for tracking the diffusion of online social movements.\u201d Algorithms are applied to \u201clarge amounts of text collected from a wide variety of organizations\u2019 media outlets to discover their hotly debated topics, and their discriminative perspectives voiced by opposing camps organized into multiple scales.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are then used to \u201cclassify and map individual Tweeter\u2019s message content to social movements based on the perspectives expressed in their weekly tweets.\u201d The LookingGlass platform is able \u201cto track the geographical footprint, shifting positions and flows of individuals, topics and perspectives between groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike previous systems, the Pentagon\u2019s appropriation of LookingGlass can provide \u201creal-time contextual analysis of complex socio-political situations that are rife with volatility and uncertainty. It is able to rapidly recognize radical hot-spots of networks, narratives and activities, and their socio-cultural economic, political drivers,\u201d and is able to identify and track specific \u201cradical\u201d and \u201cnon-radical\u201d individuals, along with shifts in their beliefs and affiliations to \u201cradical\u201d and \u201cnon-radical\u201d movements and organizations.<\/p>\n

\"gchq-spying<\/a><\/p>\n

The Entire Physical and Virtual World is a Militarized Battlefield<\/strong><\/p>\n

U.S. intelligence experts assessing the Minerva initiative strongly disagreed with Fitzgerald\u2019s claims that these Pentagon-funded research projects would contribute to minimizing conflict.<\/p>\n

In my earlier\u00a0report on Minerva<\/a>, I disclosed an internal Minerva staff email related directly to the ASU\u2019s radicalization discourse project, which confirmed that the program is geared toward producing \u201ccapabilities that are deliverable quickly\u201d for application to field operations. Senior Pentagon officials had told ASU staff to develop \u201cmodels and tools that can be integrated with operations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The analytical tools developed for the Pentagon by ASU researchers are directly applicable to the\u00a0extensive data-mining programs of the National Security Agency<\/a>\u00a0revealed by whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Russell Tice, William Binney and Thomas Drake, among others. Billions of pieces of data in the form of phone calls, emails, photos and videos from major communication giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, among others, are collected and then analyzed to identify national security threats.<\/p>\n

Technologies like LookingGlass could dramatically advance the NSA\u2019s capacity to track and analyse metadata in the context of the “open source” online data it mines so comprehensively. Former senior NSA executive and whistleblower Thomas Drake told me regarding the Minerva-funded data-mining projects, \u201cWe must remember that the entire world, physical and virtual, is considered by the Pentagon as fair game and a militarized battlefield.\u201d<\/p>\n

LookingGlass, along with the other data-mining tools being developed by universities with Pentagon funding, fits neatly into the parameters of earlier intelligence structures such as the Pentagon\u2019s “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) program launched by the Bush administration, described by the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cthe most sweeping effort to monitor the activity of Americans since the 1960\u2019s.\u201d TIA\u2019s function was to use data-mining \u201cto create risk profiles for millions of visitors and American citizens in its quest for suspicious patterns of behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under Obama, this has evolved into the global \u201cdisposition matrix,\u201d a \u201cnext-generation targeting list\u201d which \u201ccontains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled\u201d to kill them, including the ability to map \u201cplans for the \u2018disposition\u2019 of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.\u201d The kill lists, reported the\u00a0Washington Post<\/a>, are part of \u201ca single, continually evolving database in which biographies, locations, known associates and affiliated organizations are all catalogued. So are strategies for taking targets down, including extradition requests, capture operations and drone patrols.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is therefore no coincidence that Lisa Troy \u2013 the Pentagon\u2019s Minerva supervisor for the University of Washington\u2019s project, aiming to \u201cfingerprint\u201d the configuration of \u201cmass political movements\u201d to gauge the determinants of \u201csocial change\u201d \u2013 is an employee of Bowman Systems Management which is a leading U.S. defense contractor working on drone warfare technology.<\/p>\n

Yet as Harvard security technologist Prof. Bruce Schneier has\u00a0pointed out<\/a>, the inherently murky and fluid categories used to profile terrorists and potential terrorists mean that the risk of seeing terrorists where there are none is higher the more data is inputted into the data-mining system.<\/p>\n

\u201cDepending on how you \u2018tune\u2019 your detection algorithms, you can err on one side or the other,\u201d Schneier writes. \u201cYou can increase the number of false positives to ensure that you are less likely to miss an actual terrorist plot, or you can reduce the number of false positives at the expense of missing terrorist plots. To reduce both those numbers, you need a well-defined profile.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem is that for terrorism, he writes, \u201cThere is no well-defined profile, and attacks are very rare. Taken together, these facts mean that data mining systems won\u2019t uncover any terrorist plots until they are very accurate, and that even very accurate systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is why the NSA\u2019s eavesdropping program \u201cspat out thousands of tips per month,\u201d said Schneier, and \u201cevery one of them turned out to be a false alarm.\u201d Although \u201cuseless for finding terrorists,\u201d the NSA\u2019s data-mining is\u00a0\u201cuseful for monitoring political opposition<\/a>\u00a0and stymieing the activities of those who do not believe the government’s propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat this is really about is furthering the militarization of domestic law enforcement and going further down the rabbit hole into the belief that it is possible to control the 99% if you just have enough surveillance and enough armed force,\u201d said ex-CIA official Robert Steele, speaking about ASU\u2019s LookingGlass platform.<\/p>\n

Indeed, although the NCTC\u2019s criteria for generating kill lists remains secret, a leaked NCTC document obtained by\u00a0The Intercept<\/a>\u00a0in July revealed that the criteria to add individuals to watch lists of \u201cknown or suspected terrorists\u201d in the first instance was vague, requiring only \u201creasonable suspicion,\u201d not \u201cconcrete facts.\u201d Supporting evidence for doing so could be as thin as a single, uncorroborated social media post \u2013 which perhaps explains why 40% of suspects on the main watch list are not linked to any \u201crecognized terrorist group.\u201d<\/p>\n

Extrajudicial assassinations known as “signature” strikes, targeting groups of terrorism suspects whose identities are not known, reportedly have far more fluid criteria in determining whether they are plotting or engaged in terrorist activity \u2013 so fluid that State Department officials\u00a0complained<\/a>\u00a0to the White House that the CIA\u2019s criteria is \u201ctoo lax.\u201d They joked that if the CIA sees \u201cthree people doing jumping jacks\u201d in a hostile territory, it would be designated a terrorist training camp. Hence, drone warfare in Pakistan and Yemen has frequently targeted \u201cterrorist suspects\u201d about whom the CIA \u201cwere not certain beforehand of their presence\u201d and \u201cwhose names they do not know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe algorithms being developed at ASU remind me of the algorithms used as the basis for signature strikes with drones,\u201d said former senior NSA executive Thomas Drake. In 2006, Drake leaked information about the NSA\u2019s data-mining project Trailblazer to the press. Although the U.S. government attempted to prosecute him under the Espionage Act in 2010, the case collapsed.<\/p>\n

\"gchq-spying<\/a><\/p>\n

I asked Drake whether the ASU\u2019s algorithms could be applied to fine-tuning the generation of “kill lists” for drone strikes. \u201cYour hunch is right,\u201d he said. \u201cHaving the U.S. government and Department of Defense fund this kind of research at the university level will bias the results by default. This is a fall-out of big data research of this type, using algorithms to detect patterns when the patterns themselves are an effect \u2013 and mixing up correlation with causality. Under this flawed approach, many false positives are possible and these results can create an ends of profiling justifying the means of data-mining.\u201d<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed isa member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment. He is director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development,<\/em> a bestselling author, investigative journalist and international security scholar who writes for <\/em>The Guardian on the geopolitics of environmental, energy and economic crises. He is the author of<\/em> A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It<\/a>, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, <\/em>Zero Point<\/a>. The Sibel Edmonds memoirs, <\/em>Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story<\/a> is available from all good online booksellers.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

The U.S. Department of Defense’s multimillion dollar university research program, the Minerva Research Initiative, is developing new data mining and analysis tools for the U.S. military intelligence community to capture and analyze social media posts. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46547","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=46547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}