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.