The Brave New World of Pre-Crime

[Lauren Johnson]

What's Your Threat Score? If it's over a given level, can you be found guilty of committing a potential crime?

Police have found a new way to legally incorporate surveillance and profiling into everyday life. Just when you thought we were making progress raising awareness surrounding police brutality, we have something new to contend with. The Police Threat Score isn't calculated by a racist police officer or a barrel-rolling cop who thinks he's on a TV drama; it's a computer algorithm that steals your data and calculates your likelihood of risk and threat for the fuzz.

Beware is the new stats-bank that helps officers analyze "billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and...social-media postings" to ultimately come up with a score that indicates a person's potential for violence, according to a Washington Post story. No word yet on whether this meta data includes photos and facial recognition software. For example would an ordinary person, yet to commit a crime, be flagged when seen wearing a hoodie in a gated Florida community?

The company tries to paint itself as a savior to first responders, claiming they want to help them "understand the nature of the environment they may encounter during the window of a 911 event." Think of it like someone pulling your credit score when you apply for a job. Except, in this instance you never applied for the job and they're pulling your credit score anyway because they knew you might apply. It's that level of creepiness.

Remember the 2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report? It's set in 2054, a futuristic world where the "pre-crime" unit arrests people based on a group of psychics who can see crimes before they happen. Only, it's 2016 and we're not using psychics, we're using computers that mine data. According to the Post piece, law enforcement in Oregon are under federal investigation for using software to monitor Black Lives Matter hashtags after uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson. How is this new software any different? In fact, this is the same kind of technology the NSA has been using since 9/11 to monitor online activities of suspected terroriststhey're just bringing it down to the local level.

According to FatalEncounters.org, a site that tracks deaths by cop, there were only 14 days in 2015 in which a law enforcement officer did not kill someone. So, leaving judgment up to the individual hasn't been all that effective in policing. But is letting a machine do it any better? Using these factors to calculate a color-coded threat level doesn't seem entirely practical. Suppose a person doesn't use social media or own a house but was once arrested when he was 17 for possession of marijuana. The absence of data might lend itself to a high threat level. The same can be said for online meta data that might filter in extracurricular interests. Could a person who is interested in kinky activity in the bedroom be tagged as having a tendency toward violence?

The Fresno, Calif. police department is taking on the daunting task of being the first to test the software in the field. Understandably, the city council and citizens voiced their skepticism at a meeting. "One council member referred to a local media report saying that a woman's threat level was elevated because she was tweeting about a card game titled 'Rage,' which could be a keyword in Beware's assessment of social media," the Post reported.

While you might now be rethinking playing that Mafia game on Facebook, it isn't just your personal name that can raise a flag. Fresno Councilman Clinton Olivier, a libertarian-leaning Republican, asked for his name to be run through the system. He came up as a "green" which indicates he's safe. When they ran his address, however, it popped up as "yellow" meaning the officer should beware and be prepared for a potentially dangerous situation. How could this be? Well, the councilman didn't always live in this house; someone else lived there before him and that person was likely responsible for raising the threat score.

Think what a disastrous situation that could be. A mother of a toddler could move into a new home with her family, not knowing that the house was once the location of an abusive patriarch. The American Medical Association has calculated that as many as 1 in 3 women will be impacted by domestic violence in their lifetimes, so it isn't an unreasonable hypothetical. One day the child eats one of those detergent pods and suddenly the toddler isn't breathing. Hysterial, the mother calls 911, screaming. She can't articulate what has happened, only that her baby is hurt. Dispatch sends an ambulance, but the address is flagged as "red" for its prior decade of domestic violence calls. First responders don't know someone new has moved in. The woman is giving CPR while her husband waits at the door for the ambulance. What happens when the police arrive?

It's a scenario that can be applied to just about any family and any situation. Moving into an apartment that previously was a marijuana grow-house; buying a house that once belonged to a woman who shot her husband when she found him with his mistress in the pool. Domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous for police officers. Giving police additional suspicion that may not be entirely accurate probably won't reduce the incidents of of accidental shootings or police brutality.

The worst part, however, is that none of these questions and concerns can be answered, because Intrado, the company that makes Beware, doesn't reveal how its algorithm works. Chances are slim that they ever will, since it would also be revealed to its competitors. There's no way of knowing the accuracy level of the data set given in the search. Police are given red, yellow or green to help them make a life-changing or life-ending decision. It seems a little primitive, not to mention intrusive.

"It is deeply disturbing that local law enforcement agencies are unleashing the sophisticated tools of a surveillance state on the public with little, if any, oversight or accountability," Ryan Kiesel of the Oklahoma ACLU told me. "We are in the middle of a consequential moment in which the government is unilaterally changing the power dynamic between themselves and the people they serve. If we are going to preserve the fundamental right of privacy, it is imperative that we demand these decisions are made as the result of a transparent and informed public debate."

While mass shootings are on the rise, violent crime and homicides have fallen to historic lows. You wouldn't know that watching the evening news, however. Is now really the time to increase the chances of violent actions at the hands of the police, all while intruding on our civil liberties under the guise of safety?

[Michael Barwell]

ELF whispers & behavioural sets and excitation potentials and then along comes Derren sodding Brown and yer cat throws-up all over yer new settee and carpet and £300 new rug for 6weeks in a row every single morning and some tool irradiates you [sharp pain to left arm there] with a this an' a that an' then they point and edit and say "There we go". I'm biteing my tongue here somewhat; don't get me started on the convenience of picking and choosing yer white mice with a shitty stick.

[Michael Barwell]

No surprise there's a few things I might add to this after an evenings cogitation. Not sure I buy into the report much, I think it's as much a veil as anything, but some interesting stuff nevertheless. All done

Police have found a new way to legally incorporate surveillance and profiling into everyday lifeThe precursor to what may well be the largest number of illegalities in one place in 'civic' history, an opportunity to extreme & calculated & injurious barbarisms to mind, body & properties; the collection, training & empowerment of gangster, sadistic psychopaths, emboldened by both the means and by the employers identity - blackstate; a militaristic, oligarchical assault of torture-murder on the citizenry, those "labrats", electro-chemically tortured & murdered. Just when you thought we were making progress raising awareness surrounding police brutality, we have something new to contend with. The Police Threat Score isn't calculated by a racist police officer or a barrel-rolling cop who thinks he's on a TV drama; it's a computer algorithm that steals your data and calculates your likelihood of risk and threat for the fuzz.

Beware is the new stats-bank that helps officers analyze "billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and...social-media postings" to ultimately come up with a score that indicates a person's potential for violence, according to a Washington Post story. No word yet on whether this meta data includes photos and facial recognition software. For example would an ordinary person, yet to commit a crime, be flagged when seen wearing a hoodie in a gated Florida community?

The company tries to paint itself as a savior to first responders, claiming they want to help them "understand the nature of the environment they may encounter during the window of a 911 event." Are they evangelical salesmen? The thing about psychopaths, is that they can radiate a certainty, or as salesmen, a 'clarity of vision' which is attractive to ornarary folk (I long ago called 'Ben' a "cyber-Ted Bundy", 'Ted' is of course a very standard ref now, and the not too long ago, "Teddy Roosevelt" cropped-up in an email from him - disappeared in Mexico, don'cha know). On the other hand, what flicks their switch, alonside proselatizing, is practicing & executing sadism, which plays to their feelings of megalomania. I've seen these wide-eyed and smirking goons alot, both in reallife & in the wi-fi choreographed dream conferencing - they just literally can't help themselves (it is just like the film, 'Inception'), where they insane-Cheshire-cat-it in their plastic 'Matrixbollocksworld' of preference, that they can let loose their inner shitehound. I'm sure that of the hacking 'community', this personality disorder type is over the odds more prevalent, by per capita. The more stupid of the type, not much more than trained monkeys and on that par, live next door to me, the mid to arse-end of the V-manner ladder (Vertrauensmann), Kapos, "protected by the law" I got just a couple of nights ago, neatly both talking shit and bullshitting at the same time: they're once and twice removed and supported logistically & technologically by blackstate, effectively black-on-black and cut-out(s). There's the requirements to prove worth, with that betraying profit and ego-maniacal motive in incarceration & "incineration", as they say. Think of it like someone pulling your credit score when you apply for a job. Except, in this instance you never applied for the job and they're pulling your credit score anyway because they knew you might apply. It's that level of creepiness. Very naiive.

Remember the 2002 Tom Cruise movie Minority Report? It's set in 2054, a futuristic world where the "pre-crime" unit arrests people based on a group of psychics who can see crimes before they happen. Only, it's 2016 and we're not using psychics, we're using computers that mine data. The read-and-feed capability of the 'mind machine' (a cack-handed but understandable term), and the brain-to-brain & brain-to-machine interfaces (BBI, BMI), is literally as tho' your mind is in serial cable with one & more others of ppl ('influence technicians') in real-time, and the same with AI 'robots' (the day I attempted suicide after falling for their techniques & technology, they all tuned-in to 'watch'/experience the gig, they could let their hair down a bit, and I could sense & hear some 30 of them I think; the excited shuffling of feet and restlessness was palpable). The capability is broad, deep & wi-fi. I don't know how the targeting works, whether it's directed radio waves, or if, as Rifat says, everyone has their own unique biorhythms which translate to IP numbers, in this electro-magnetic soup in which we live. I do know that I get effects whilst walking places which seem to be via the eye-tracking capability, so I assume it's the soup (and surely some sort of implants). These conclusions are after 4.5yrs of empirical observations, from a science-minded perspective, and loathesome of conspiracy theories. According to the Post piece, law enforcement in Oregon are under federal investigation for using software to monitor Black Lives Matter hashtags after uprisings in Baltimore and Ferguson. How is this new software any different? In fact, this is the same kind of technology the NSA has been using since 9/11 to monitor online activities of suspected terroriststhey're just bringing it down to the local level. In the final email in 2011 before it and my YT account were deleted by 'them', 'Ben' had said that he worked for the NSA, which is actually worthless, except that hubris is massive in shitehound world, of course.


According to FatalEncounters.org, a site that tracks deaths by cop, there were only 14 days in 2015 in which a law enforcement officer did not kill someone. 'Promoted' into the civil law enforcement sphere (typing's being messed with - the types disaperaing if I have to go back to add something or spell correct, so I'll post now and add later). Seems clear that these capabilities were proving of great potential, but operationally pretty useless for 'deployment-max'; this is what they constantly refer to by apophenics, as "genocide" - using it on the civil population to excise people; pretty basic statements from them, not much sleight-of-hand of the original 'malevolent gods & superheros' gig, but then, they've dropped their veil as I've found my feet in this shiessewelt they've construed. My belief in science has saved my life, in a sense, so now they're oh-so verbose (by apophenics, skits, tv pic/sound breaks and neuralgics & maser(?) shots, about claiming 'science' for themselves, like proper Herr Doktor Mengeles. [B][size=12]Bearing in mind the distinction between 'cops' & 'shitehounds', that's simply not true; also, see Rifat's 'Zombie Police'; not sure if I believe this myself per se, but 'you' don't half- torture-murder-drive insane- 'brainwash'-indoctrinate - in for a penny, in for a pound.
[/SIZE][/B]So, leaving judgment up to the individual hasn't been all that effective in policing[B] Again, naiive; if the idea is to effectively spread fear and to dominate; some of the people I've had directed at me as per the arse-end of the V-manner ladder, total scallies. Perhaps this is behind the drop in crime levels so often presumed in a society where the faith in the ploice has dropped. In the early/mid '90's I lived in Cardiff, where, during a conversation with a hair-dresser-fella, he voiced a total lack of faith in the cops there, after telling me about having had his car broken into and stuff nicked by a fella he knew - I was genuinely shocked at his shoulder-shrugs and "They just won't do anything about it - I know that".
[/B]. But is letting a machine do it any better? [B]I have no doubt that AI is used in the schiz-/ttrauma 'training' program; references/'triggers'/cues, to word substitutions (eg, anything that sounds remotely like "suicide" gets that substitution on my tv, and then (often-) tv pic/sound breakes and for all I know, the sudden neuralgic pains to my head. They're called 'apophenics' & 'ideas of reference'.
[/B]Using these factors to calculate a color-coded threat level doesn't seem entirely practical. [B]Duh. I hate to say it, but MK-Ultra-ing, Manchurian Candidating, dissociative disorder(s), and identity/loyalty 'programming'/dictation. In some of the dream choreography I get, I've seen faint 'ticker-tape' rolling across my closed eyes vision, and the 'whispers' of words inside my mind, that are entirely incongruous with the moment. (I was so surprised to actually 'see' the ticker tape, en claire as it were, that, like the time the radio started speaking clearly to me, that the message itself didn't register. I get this daft shit all the time, their stupid games and fabricating orchestrations - "I told you so", yeah - you put stuff there to call yersel' a superdooper'ero, shitehound, I've seen thru' most of your 'games', I suspect).
[/B]Suppose a person doesn't use social media or own a house but was once arrested when he was 17 for possession of marijuana. [B]Yup. That's me alright. [/B]The absence of data might lend itself to a high threat level. The same can be said for online meta data that might filter in extracurricular interests. Could a person who is interested in kinky activity in the bedroom be tagged as having a tendency toward violence? [B]As one half of an equal and loving relaitionship, "Yup"; I feel no need to justify this to you, shitehounds. "Beauty", you've called her - green-eyed monsters? What is it about you that you can't accept what's in her mind? - ...super...dooper...heerrooosss..?
[/B]
The Fresno, Calif. police department is taking on the daunting task of being the first to test the software in the field. Understandably, the city council and citizens voiced their skepticism at a meeting. "One council member referred to a local media report saying that a woman's threat level was elevated because she was tweeting about a card game titled 'Rage,' 'rage', a reference I've had 2-3 times as of the last month or so which could be a keyword in Beware's assessment of social media," the Post reported. I used to play a game called 'Devastation' where I got quite paly with a fella from OK who played with his wife, father & a friend; this friend of his, who I didn't like, sometimes called hisself 'Timmy' & 'Timothy McVeigh' even [MAE 'chirp' there - pat diahorrea narrative which I'm flagging again now]. Irish family I gather, and republican/pro-IRA, but more-or-less before I kenw this, we just 'clicked', me and this lad, shared alot of laughs and conversations in-game. Without entering a player-name in the game, it just defaulted as 'Player', which is what IRA/etc.(?) 'Active Service Unit' members called themselves, or were called. I don't fully 'buy' this algorithm thing as being entirely valid here, but I'd told 'Ben' about all of this, and if the software program is a go-er and a potential torture-murder sentencing machine, then he'd've added it to the mix no doubt about it, because it's all about a fanatical evangelicism of gangster psychopaths, and that's what they do. Also, I'd told 'Ben' (this is c.3years of daily multi-hour conversations and chatting) that at school we used to make 'bombs' (alot of boys do this sort of stuff), & I'm interested chronically and broadly in the military & spy stuff too (I lurve that '50's/'60's Cold War Berlin noir feel, 'arry Palmer, Quiller Memorandum, JLC etc. I have no doubt that all this has been very deliberately invenomated for effect; living alone helped with the 'go-code', a grand opportunity for cess deployment and operational research (just last week, a loud 'thump' on the wall, precise & synch to "lab rat"); the roll-out of an enormous synthesis of techniques & technologies, "We're glad we met you", in the tv context of 'operational research', last week or so - "Yeah, I bet - your dream choreography used to be utterly shit, and the power-levels of your ELF into-mind machine were way too high; and when you drop-in "You're being followed", you don't shout it as per a subverbalisation in word-for-word, you arrogant, smirking, drooling, lightweight, amateur shit-heads - I'll bet you're pleased indeed" - yer supposed to THINK the concept. They think themselves "sophisticated", but they're just so many age-old primitives with 'new' toys. I long-ago thought - by observation, that this 'information age' is more regressive and devolving that it's given credit for.

While you might now be rethinking playing that Mafia game on Facebook, it isn't just your personal name [B]'Frankincensed', because "I'm frank, and often incensed by what I see & read", social injustice and media PR blinkers and bufoonery, venal nepotisms. [/B]that can raise a flag. Fresno Councilman Clinton Olivier, a libertarian-leaning Republican, asked for his name to be run through the system. He came up as a "green" which indicates he's safe. When they ran his address, however, it popped up as "yellow" meaning the officer should beware and be prepared for a potentially dangerous situation. How could this be? Well, the councilman didn't always live in this house; someone else lived there before him and that person was likely responsible for raising the threat score. [B]Like the AC-130 gunshipping of the Kunduz hospital for a half hour - "Computers don't like", no-ones to blame, "hey-ho, guess someone better get a promotion quicksharpish; wave that flag an' everyones a winner". The hospital was well advertised; someone just didn't bother adding it to the relevant zeros-an'-ones stash.
[/B]
Think what a disastrous situation that could be. A mother of a toddler could move into a new home with her family, not knowing that the house was once the location of an abusive patriarch. The American Medical Association has calculated that as many as 1 in 3 women will be impacted by domestic violence in their lifetimes, so it isn't an unreasonable hypothetical. One day the child eats one of those detergent pods and suddenly the toddler isn't breathing. Hysterial, the mother calls 911, screaming. She can't articulate what has happened, only that her baby is hurt. Dispatch sends an ambulance, but the address is flagged as "red" for its prior decade of domestic violence calls. First responders don't know someone new has moved in. The woman is giving CPR while her husband waits at the door for the ambulance. What happens when the police arrive?

It's a scenario that can be applied to just about any family and any situation. Moving into an apartment that previously was a marijuana grow-house; buying a house that once belonged to a woman who shot her husband when she found him with his mistress in the pool. Domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous for police officers. Giving police additional suspicion that may not be entirely accurate probably won't reduce the incidents of of accidental shootings or police brutality.

The worst part, however, is that none of these questions and concerns can be answered, because Intrado, the company that makes Beware, doesn't reveal how its algorithm works. Chances are slim that they ever will, since it would also be revealed to its competitors. There's no way of knowing the accuracy level of the data set given in the search. Police are given red, yellow or green to help them make a life-changing or life-ending decision. It seems a little primitive, not to mention intrusive.

"It is deeply disturbing that local law enforcement agencies are unleashing the sophisticated tools of a surveillance state on the public with little, if any, oversight or accountability," Ryan Kiesel of the Oklahoma ACLU told me. "We are in the middle of a consequential moment in which the government is unilaterally changing the power dynamic between themselves and the people they serve. If we are going to preserve the fundamental right of privacy, it is imperative that we demand these decisions are made as the result of a transparent and informed public debate." That's all gone, it's a fait accompli. Get noticed for any reason and a 'Ben Yoyer' will troll the shit out of you & sit in your mind for months for the sheer thrill of it (some people really are 'just like that') learning your passes, orchestrating their diahorrea, twisting & skewing for effect neatly fitting you into a superdooperhero scenario. The basic Ranger-R I'll wager is SOP.

While mass shootings are on the rise, violent crime and homicides have fallen to historic lows. You wouldn't know that watching the evening news, however. Is now really the time to increase the chances of violent actions at the hands of the police, all while intruding on our civil liberties under the guise of safety? I suspect US & UK societies & policing are at once being militarised & pacified ("There are only two types of people - hunters and farmers"). Maybe there's a 'Woodpecker' at work and not just the convenience of light entertainments; maybe that's where all the 'wood' & 'trees' I get comes from.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Pentagon's secret pre-crime program to know your thoughts, predict your future

US military contractors are mining social media to influence your cognitive behavior' when you get angry at the state

By Nafeez Ahmed

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new crowd-funded investigative journalism project.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) wants contractors to mine your social media posts to develop new ways for the US government to infer what you're really thinking and feeling  and to predict what you'll do next.
Pentagon documents released over the last few months identify ongoing classified research in this area that the federal government plans to expand, by investing millions more dollars.
The unclassified documents, which call on external scientists, institutions and companies to submit proposals for research projects, not only catalogue how far US military capabilities have come, but also reveal the Pentagon's goals: building the US intelligence community's capacity to forecast population behavior at home and abroad, especially groups involved in political activism.
They throw light on the extent to which the Pentagon's classified pre-crime R&D has advanced, and how the US military intends to deploy it in operations around the world.

Could your social media signature reveal your innermost thoughts?

A new Funding Opportunity Announcement document issued by the DoD's Office of Naval Research (ONR) calls for research proposals on how mining social media can provide insight on people's real thoughts, emotions and beliefs, and thereby facilitate predictions of behavior.
The research for Fiscal Year 2016 is part of the Pentagon's Multidisciplinary Research Program of the University Research Initiative (MURI), which was initiated over 25 years ago, regularly producing what the DoD describes as "significant scientific breakthroughs with far reaching consequences to the fields of science, economic growth, and revolutionary new military technologies."
The document calls for new work "to understand latent communication among small groups." Social meaning comes not just from "the manifest content of communication (i.e., literal information), but also from latent content  how language is structured and used, as well as how communicators address each other, e.g., through non-verbal means  gestures, head nods, body position, and the dynamics in communication patterns."
The Pentagon wants to understand not just what we say, but what is "latent" in what we say: "Subtle interactions such as deception and reading between the lines, or tacit understanding between communicators, relative societal position or relationship between communicators, is less about what is said and more about what is latent."
All this, it is imagined, can be derived from examining social media, using new techniques from the social and behavioral sciences.
The Pentagon wants to:

"… recognize/predict social contexts, relationships, networks, and intentions from social media, taking into account non-verbal communication such as gestures, micro-expressions, posture, and latent semantics of text and speech."

By understanding latent communication, the Pentagon hopes to develop insight into "the links between actors, their intentions, and context for use of latent signals for group activity." The idea is to create:

"… algorithms for prediction and collection of latent signals and their use in predicting social information."

These algorithms also need to "accurately detect key features of speech linked to these structural patterns (e.g., humor, metaphor, emotion, language innovations) and subtle non-verbal elements of communication (e.g., pitch, posture, gesture) from text, audio, and visual media."
The direct military applications of this sort of information can be gleaned from the background of the administrator of this new research program, Dr. Purush Iyer, who is Division chief of Network Sciences at the US Army Research Laboratory (USARL).
Among the goals of Dr. Iyer's research at the US Army are expanding "Intelligent Networks" which can "augment human decision makers with enhanced-embedded battlefield intelligence that will provide them with tools for creating necessary situational awareness, reconnaissance, and decision making to decisively defeat any future adversarial threats."

Creeping police state

The allure of co-opting Big Data to enhance domestic policing is already picking up steam in the US and UK.
In the US, an unknown number of police authorities are already piloting a software called Beware', which analyses people's social media activity, property records, the records of friends, family or associates, among other data, to assign suspects a so-called "threat-score."
That "threat-score" can then be used by police to pre-judge if a suspect is going to be dangerous, and to adapt their approach accordingly.
Given the police's discriminatory track record with shootings of unarmed black people skyrocketing, the extent to which such Minority Report'-style policing could backfire by justifying more discriminatory policing is alarming.
In the UK, Home Secretary Theresa May just last week told the Police ICT Suppliers Summit that polices forces should use predictive analytics to "identify those most at risk of crime, locations most likely to see crimes committed, patterns of suspicious activity that may merit investigation and to target their resources most effectively against the greatest threats."
Noting that the police have yet to catch up with the "vast quantities of data" being generated by citizens, she complained: "Forces have not yet begun to explore the crime prevention opportunities that data offers."
In reality, the shift to predictive policing in the UK is well underway, with Greater Manchester, Kent, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and London's Metropolitan Police having undertaken trials of a software known as "PredPol."
According to the UK College of Policing's National Policing Vision for 2016:

"Predictive analysis and real-time access to intelligence and tasking in the field will be available on modern mobile devices. Officers and staff will be provided with intelligence that is easy to use and relevant to their role, location and local tasking."

The next threat is social change, economic collapse

Driving the hunger to capture Big Data is a growing recognition that the post-2008 era of slow economic growth and geopolitical crisis is likely to lead to a continuing risk of civil unrest  both within Western homelands, and in foreign regions of strategic interest.
The Pentagon's new research calls are designed to build on a wide range of already active programs developing ways to integrate open source data, including the social media footprints of entire populations, into sophisticated computer models.
One of the most disturbing applications of this sort of information was described in a new Funding Opportunity Announcement released last month for the Minerva Research Initiative, a DoD social science program founded in 2008.
Among the subject areas mentioned in the announcement is "Influence and mobilization for change", which includes themes like:

"Analyses of the topology, power structure, productivity, merging and splitting, and overall resilience of change-driven organizations."

Other overlapping themes the Pentagon wants input on are:

"Mechanisms of information dissemination and influence across diverse populations"; "Mechanisms of (and factors inhibiting) mobilization at individual and group levels"; "Factors that make specific individuals/groups influential within a particular cultural context"; and "The interaction between emotion and cognition and its impact on future behavior."

These are generic themes concerning the dynamics of community-driven change activism in general. Yet the underlying assumption implicit in the document is the conviction that change activism can in some cases in itself generate a threat to national security.
The document also explains that research on such themes:

"… will help the Department of Defense better understand what drives individuals and groups to mobilize for change and the mechanisms of that mobilization, particularly when violent tactics are adopted. This research will inform understanding of where organized violence may erupt, what factors might explain its spread, and how one might mitigate its effects."

This and several other paragraphs are verbatim copied from an earlier Minerva call for research that I reported on about a year ago. As I observed then:

"At first glance, this seems fairly innocuous, but it reveals a disturbing ideological bias in the Pentagon's conception of social and political dissent. The assumption that the adoption of violent tactics' is linked to the issues that motivate people to mobilize for change' conflates the dynamics of change activism in general with a risk of being involved in organized violence.'"

The document does not specify particular types of organization or group that should be studied, except once in reference to "hacking forums," which perhaps highlights the Pentagon's increasing interest in decentralized networks like Anonymous.
The Pentagon appears to be particularly concerned about the potential risks of social crisis, civil unrest and collapse, both at home and abroad.
In a section calling for submissions on "Societal Resilience and Change", the Minerva document states that "DoD seeks to develop new insights into the social dynamics within regions and states of strategic interest, and to examine the factors that affect societal resilience to external shock' events and corresponding tipping points."
Without specifying what those "shocks" could be, the document does mention developing frameworks to improve policy "before, during, and after societal shifts like those seen during the so-called Arab Spring."
It should be noted that the Arab Spring protests had brought down and undermined brutal autocratic governments that had, however, been longstanding US allies.
The Minerva document also emphasizes the need to understand "changes in demographics (e.g., gender and age structure, wealth distribution) on internal and external stability," especially what the Pentagon describes candidly as:

"Security implications of aging populations and shrinking working age populations worldwide."

So the Pentagon anticipates a looming economic crisis due the unsustainability of the rise in an elderly population, relative to the reducing numbers of working people. It further confirms that the Pentagon perceives this as posing a potential national security crisis.
The US, and major allies like Britain, Germany, France, and Israel, are among the top 20 countries that will be most impacted by these demographic trends.
Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that in 2016, "the world's advanced economies will reach a critical milestone. For the first time since 1950, their combined working-age population will decline, according to United Nations projections, and by 2050 it will shrink 5%. The ranks of workers will also fall in key emerging markets, such as China and Russia. At the same time the share of these countries' population over 65 will skyrocket."

From open source to minority report'

By linking up metadata from social media with other forms of data  whether it's mobile phone usage metadata, geolocation information, satellite data, personal records  the Pentagon hopes to find patterns that enable it to predict future behavior.
A third major subject-theme of the Minerva research call clarifies the Pentagon's concern with enhancing its ability to predict the future.
Titled, "Analytic Methods and Metrics for Security Research," the document calls for "rigorous, validated quantitative measurement and models" which can "compare information across sets of data and across time."
Such models would enhance "opportunities for visualization of trends, and the potential to forecast future events."
Last summer, a similar research call was issued through a Broad Agency Announcement issued by the DoD's Office of Naval Research (ONR), related to "Expeditionary Intelligence Surveillance, Reconnaissance Science and Technology."
A significant portion of the ONR document is dedicated to outlining the need for predictive models.

"In being able to use social media as an ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] signal, ONR is interested in theoretical constructs that allow understanding and thus interpretation of an online open media signature and its relationship to on the ground sentiment and behavior."

The Pentagon wants to develop approaches that will allow open source analysis of a person's or group's publically available social media "signature"  the full array of their social media activities  and how this relates to both emotional "sentiment" and actual "behavior."
ONR also wants to know "how social media can be used as a seed in a Global Knowledge Environment (cloud based, big data repository that includes imagery, video, ship tracks, METOC [meteorology and oceanography] and analytic products) to discover additional information about the physical, military, and sociocultural environment of an operational area of interest."
Basically: everything in an area of interest.'
The Minority Report' style implications of this sort of social media data mining are explained in some detail:

"Information demands that social media could be helpful in fulfilling include:

Predict, detect, track violent behavior by groups

Understand anomalous event/sentiment signals/signatures in a region of interest

Derive sociocultural trends to assist in decision making

Identify trends, local perceptions, media bias, cultural nuances, and environmental distinctions.

Connecting people, places, and things to uncover physical, cyber, financial, social, operational aspects of an unknown or emerging threat

Pattern of life analysis used to provide visibility and thus vulnerability to physical, informational, social aspects of a threat

Radicalization methods, speed of spread (ISIL as an example)  signature to see tipping point or understand sooner (strategy, tactics, rhetoric, narrative, what can be tracked in social media)."

Prediction is repeatedly mentioned as a core goal:

"It may be possible to better predict what affect aiding,' attacking', isolating' will have in an area if behaviour/action surrogates can be found in historical data for which some ground truth exists."

Social media data can thus be integrated with a wide range of open source information from other sources to generate complex, quantitatively-grounded empirical models of population and group behaviour.
The idea is to use such models "to explain, track, and anticipate key group behaviors including cooperation, communication (information operations), conflict, consolidation, and fragmentation that characterize the factional dynamics among multiple, independent armed actors in insurgencies and civil wars."

The all-seeing eye

One significant area the document emphasises is advancing the Pentagon's ability to detect "complex events" using algorithms which can identify patterns of events within "large data streams."
How, in other words, does the US intelligence community make sense of the massive amounts of surveillance data absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies, with a view to detect a real threat?
The document confirms the longstanding position of critics of the NSA like Bruce Schneier, that although existing technologies are great for simplistic issues like detecting credit card fraud, they are virtually useless for detecting real terrorist activity:

"While this works well for the detection of a behavior exhibited by a subpopulation (e.g. credit card fraud), its application to complex patterns applied to diverse actors leads to a high false alarm rate."

This has never been publicly admitted by the Pentagon or US intelligence community, but it is acknowledge here, clear as daylight.
To address the problem, the Pentagon proposes to create new ways of integrating social media into a single, giant analytical system, which can feed directly into US military operations.
The ONR document describes, for instance, wanting to build a next generation of "Marine Civil Information Management System" (MARCISMS NEXGEN), to support the US Marine Corps, which "must be able to intelligently query both structured and unstructured data sources… Relevant area of operations (AO) data (e.g. social media, news reports, METOC, Automatic Information System (AIS), video, images, etc.) must be easily consumed."
The new MARCISMS engine must also be "built on natural language processing, machine learning, predictive modeling, inference models, and confidence modeling."

Population control

The association with civil-military operations demonstrates the importance of such predictive tools for counter-insurgency operations abroad, and accordingly, increasing the effectiveness of US propaganda operations.
Models, the ONR document says, should "suggest ways to draw groups closer or further apart to each other or to a concept," based on "predictions about whether groups attract' or repel.'"
Much of the information used to run such models would come from "unclassified data."
In this context, these new technologies will help achieve a key goal of the US Marine Corps: to "maintain, influence, or exploit relationships between military forces and indigenous populations and institutions."
Ultimately, then, this is not simply about predicting the behavior of diverse populations and social groups.
The Pentagon wants the ability to use this predictive capacity to manipulate human behavior, and thereby win wars.
One explicit discussion of this goal was recently published by the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU) in its 2016 Research Topics monograph, which highlighted subjects considered high priority by experts across the US Special Forces (SOF) community.
"Defining and understanding the human domain' and how SOF can influence cognitive behavior in myriad operational environments continues to be a topic of interest," the JSOU document asserts.

"What affects people's perceptions and decision-making that SOF can favorably influence to prevent/mitigate/deter crisis and conflict? What are the future advanced technologies and cultural social practices for engaging underdeveloped populations in support of partner governments to achieve US interests?"

But what happens if those interests happen to be at odds with popular demands for self-determination, economic independence and resource nationalism? The counter-democratic implications are already on display in US support for brutal autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
These cases suggest that massive data-mining is designed to help US military agencies influence the "cognitive behaviour" of "underdeveloped populations," so that the governments that rule them may continue conforming to "US interests."
In other words, the US military wants to mine the world's social media footprint to suppress the risk of popular social movements undermining the status quo, at home and abroad.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the System Shift' column for VICE's Motherboard, and is a weekly columnist for Middle East Eye.
He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was twice selected in the Evening Standard's top 1,000 most globally influential Londoners, in 2014 and 2015.
Nafeez has also written and reported for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others.
He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University, where he is researching the link between global systemic crises and civil unrest for Springer Energy Briefs.
Nafeez is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner's Inquest.

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[Lauren Johnson]

First prisoner: What are you in for?

2nd prisoner: The cops figured I was fixin' to rob a bank?

First prisoner: Were ya?

2nd prisoner: Well, I asked the cops. They said I was. So guess was goin' to. How would I know?

[Michael Barwell]

The Pentagon's secret pre-crime program to know your thoughts, predict your future

US military contractors are mining social media to influence your cognitive behavior' when you get angry at the state

The first part there, they'll say that I was itching to join ISIL; having put a load of similar 'threads' into my mind and then spending 4+yrs blabbing about "ISIL"*, doubtless, in someone who's less mindful of his own mind (and suffused with great british obstinacy), where & when that b/s takes a hold, they can then say "See, we were right all along; just call us superdooper'eros an' give us the mony, accolades & recognition that we're so craven for". All thru' this ELF- & etc.- based attack, what they've done, is trip a switch that sends some shit to yer head and simultaneously triggers a reference to it, like a siren or suchlike; they're frauds - I've seen that hundreds & hundreds of times - thousands It's like that time on a train, where the moment I stepped onto it, that very clear but completely artificial and invasive sense of having the intention to bomb it came into my mind - damn curious one that; like the time I had "You're/I'm being followed" shouted intracranially/intracognitively- in the Mind shop in Clayton St N-u-T (yeah, I guess they did get a kick out of that one). So the follow-ups, is that I take a gander at my rucksack and get a 'whisper' every time I'm doing the shopping, and Hey presto, artificial PROOF of a false guilt. *- not entirely true, 1st it was 'to the funny farm be he go', 2nd, 'kill him', 3rd 'ISIL + hassle'.

That 2nd bit sounds about right; I'm in no doubt that this is a militairy thing - the number of refs to "patriotism" & "war" i get is fully retarded, and irony is entirely lost on these people because they are genuinely completely deranged.

They have that usual megalomania that comes with the latest hi-tech baubles; I think that's a very American thing, but by no means exclusively; I think it was the 1957 Brit defence white paper that said manned fighter aircraft were obsolete, and this is about the time they also thought guns on 'planes were outmoded, that missiles'd taken-over; then along comes Vietnam, and they're all so, like, "Shiiiit! - no guns". I refers to the delusion as 'Igloo White - a bucket of shite', but like they say, "Computers don't lie", neatly missing-out the pollutant in the equation of malgorithmic evangelicism (speaking of which, 'religiosity' is masssive on the shitehounds reference agenda suddenly. They're happy to forget that they're (loosely speaking-) yuman beans because it's convenient, but everything they say is shit.

911 seemed to play to the trend, causing liquefaction whereby cess flowed to the surface.

Incidentally, since last Monday, my 'Hold yer 'orses' bloggubbins, the shitehounds've had quite the bee in their bonnets​, and then some.