DoD Contract with Dataminr

[Badger52]

In my view, sure to be much more than just a piece of tech news.

Full story at the LINK here.

Fresh revelations regarding a $2.5 million contractual agreement between the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) at Fort George G. Meade and social media scrutinizer Dataminr have emerged. These claims, unveiled by a US government notice, imply a new era of digital monitoring rests on the horizon, increasingly unsettling in its reinforcement of sweeping surveillance, and potentially having implications on free speech and privacy protection.

Fort Meade, also known as the steering wheel of the US Government’s paramount signals intelligence organization, the National Security Agency, has seemingly struck a discreet deal to expand its espionage services.

In addition, a user over at Snugbus reports on his organization's use of it already:

Basically it’s a giant SEO-type program that constantly combs through various social media, looking for keywords, set on a list of parameters the user sets (key words, user ID, geographic area, ect). We use it for breaking news, to filter out actual events worthy of our attention.

Using the same operating principal, it would be pretty easy to mine social media or discussion forums for keyword/geolocation data and ferret out whoever you want for whatever reason you want.

Let’s say you wanted to identify service members who weren’t fans of the transing of children. So you’d set your AI parameters to filter out any posts using any kind of military term, from a specific area, that were critical of anything that could be considered part of the trans agenda. So all that data is collected and aggregated, and ultimately that gives you a select few filtered candidates who meet all of the criteria, and those are your targets for further in-depth investigation.

So yeah, nothing good will come of this.

[JimP]

Been using it for a few years down at Fort Sam. I raised holy-hell about it at first as it appeared not to have cleared the domestic hurdles for "collection." Didn't stop it though......

To this day, I don't know if it and another system went through the appropriate hurdles to be used domestically.

[Badger52]

Originally Posted by JimP

Been using it for a few years down at Fort Sam. I raised holy-hell about it at first as it appeared not to have cleared the domestic hurdles for "collection." Didn't stop it though......

To this day, I don't know if it and another system went through the appropriate hurdles to be used domestically.

Think hurdles matter at this point?

[Papa Zero Three]

Lets be frank here, anything can be misused or abused. But this is not something to go high and right about IMO. "We" have been using something similar since around 2013ish, that does the same thing, as a FORCEPRO/Early warning/ emerging trends tool in specific AOs. The only difference now is that a private company has a contract to do it. UTS/UDC is a thing that has been around for awhile and isn't ever going to go away and capabilities like this one are resources that are needed to stay up to date with everything that is going on in the world, every day, al the time, CONUS and OCONUS. That is the world we currently live in.

[Badger52]

Originally Posted by Papa Zero Three

That is the world we currently live in.

No dispute there, but it just seems that the left & right limits start getting fuzzy when these capabilities are a layer removed from direct government performance. (Not that NSA contractors would ever perform something illegal at the behest of their masters.) Cynical am I at this particular point? You bet, right down to my toes.

[Papa Zero Three]

Originally Posted by Badger52

No dispute there, but it just seems that the left & right limits start getting fuzzy when these capabilities are a layer removed from direct government performance.

Your reply is a good example of the disconnect that most people have when it comes to this topic. People get upset about a capability like this when they really should be concerned that an average person with a credit card has the ability to buy Ad ID information from data brokers for penny's on the dollar. Everyone's phone has Ad ID built into it by default and it the biggest collection platform in existence that can provide far more telling and is more intrusive than something like dataminr, which is a controlled capability.

Worrying about something like Dataminr is akin to worrying about the arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic and not recognizing the actual problem.