Military Exploits Tax Dollars, Hunts Down Social Media Insults Targeting Generals

Military Exploits Tax Dollars, Hunts Down Social Media Insults Targeting Generals

(ConcernedPatriot.com) – Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s Secret Service equivalency for the U.S. Army, now monitors social media to see whether anyone has posted unfavorable remarks about the nation’s highest-ranking officials.

According to a report by the Intercept, the PSB is responsible for defending personnel against “embarrassment,” in addition to more severe threats like kidnapping and assassination.

The PSB currently scans social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers it is tasked with protecting, as well as for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats, according to an Army procurement document from 2022 that the Intercept was able to get.

Protective Services Field Office/Protective Intelligence Branch:

“This is an ongoing PSIFO/PIB requirement to provide global protective services for senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, adequate security to mitigate online threats (direct, indirect, and veiled), the identification of fraudulent accounts, and positive or negative sentiment specifically relating to our senior high-risk personnel.”

According to the report, the Army plans to locate posters and track down venues for “negative sentiment.”

Via the Intercept:

“The Army’s new toolkit goes far beyond social media surveillance of the type offered by private contractors like Dataminr, which helps police and military agencies detect perceived threats by scraping social media timelines and chatrooms for various keywords.

Instead, Army Protective Services Battalion investigators would seemingly combine social media data with a broad variety of public and nonpublic information, all accessible through a “universal search selector.

These sources of information include “signal-rich discussions from illicit threat-actor communities and access to around-the-clock conversations within threat-actor channels,” public research, CCTV feeds, radio stations, news outlets, personal records, hacked information, webcams, and — perhaps most invasive — cellular location data.

The document mentions the use of “geo-fenced” data as well, a controversial practice wherein an investigator draws a shape on a digital map to focus their surveillance of a specific area.

While app-based smartphone tracking is a potent surveillance technique, it remains unclear how exactly this data might actually be used to unmask threatening social media posts, or what relevance other data categories like radio stations or academic research could possibly have.”

The PSB intends to examine not only well-known social media sites but also 4chan and Reddit discussion boards, chat services Discord and Telegram, and semi-anonymous social media websites, according to the Intercept.

Here’s another example of tax dollars exploits – drag shows on military bases.

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