Pentagon Plans to Monitor Social Media of Military Personnel for Extremist Content
Ken Klippenstein, The Intercept, May 17, 2021
As part of the Biden administration’s crackdown on domestic extremism, the Pentagon plans to launch a pilot program for screening social media content for extremist material, according to internal Defense Department documents reviewed by The Intercept, as well as a source with direct knowledge of the program.
An extremism steering committee led by Bishop Garrison, a senior adviser to the secretary of defense, is currently designing the social media screening pilot program, which will “continuously” monitor military personnel for “concerning behaviors,” according to a Pentagon briefing in late March. Although in the past the military has balked at surveilling service members for extremist political views due to First Amendment protections, the pilot program will rely on a private surveillance firm in order to circumvent First Amendment restrict
USPS Reportedly Uses Clearview AI to Spy on Americans
The United States Postal Service (USPS) is reportedly using the facial recognition technology Clearview AI to spy on American citizens.
According to interviews and documents reviewed by Yahoo News, the use of the technology by the USPS Inspection Service is part of a program that tracks citizens social media activity and shares the information with law enforcement agencies.
Under the Service s Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP), analysts use Clearview’s collection of images scraped from public websites to identify unknown targets and report on them to the authorities.
According to Yahoo News, iCOP accesses Clearview’s facial recognition database of over 3 billion images from arrest photos uploaded to social media “to help identify unknown targets in an investigation or locate additional social media accounts for known individuals.”
Analysts are reported to have used intelligence tools to track social media posts
Their work falls under the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP)
That was first revealed in April when it came under scrutiny for tracking Americans social media posts ahead of protests
Now it emerges iCOP is more far reaching than previously thought
The USPIS is said to use Clearview AI to help identify unknown targets in an investigation or locate additional social media accounts for known individuals
It also uses Zignal Labs - which runs keyword searches on possible threats - and Nfusion - which creates anonymous online accounts - in its tracking
DHS leadership failed to issue threat assessments ahead of January 6 despite receiving intelligence warnings
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing Tuesday concerning the failure of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to warn law enforcement agencies and Congress of the impending attack on the Capitol January 6.
The hearing demonstrated that I&A was receiving ample evidence of the plans to attack the Capitol in order to stop the congressional certification of the Electoral College votes and keep Trump in office as president. But none of the officials of the I&A and their supervisors in the DHS leadership were actually summoned to be questioned, rendering the entire hearing an exercise in futility.