Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s Secret Service equivalency for the U.S. Army, now keeps an eye on social media to see whether anybody has posted unfavorable remarks about the nation’s highest-ranking officials.
The PSB is responsible for defending personnel against “embarrassment,” while also responding to more serious threats such as abduction and assassination, according to a report by the Intercept.
The PSB currently scans social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers it is tasked with protecting, in addition to looking for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats, according to an Army procurement document from 2022 that the Intercept was able to get.
The Army plans to locate posters as well as track down venues for “negative sentiment,” according to the article.
“The Army’s new toolbox goes well beyond social media monitoring provided by for-profit companies like Dataminr, which assists law enforcement and military organizations in identifying potential threats by scanning social media timelines along with chatrooms for certain keywords. Instead, it appears that the Army Protective Services Battalion’s investigators would blend social media data with a wide range of both public and private information, all of which could be accessed via a ‘universal search selector.'”
These information sources include “signal-rich talks from illegal threat-actor groups as well as access to 24/7 conversations inside threat-actor channels,” open research, CCTV feeds, broadcasting stations, news organizations, private information, hacked data, webcams, and — perhaps most intrusive — cellular location information.
The letter also discusses the use of “geo-fenced” data, a contentious technique in which a detective creates a shape on a digital map to concentrate monitoring on a particular region. It is also unknown how exactly this data may be used to identify hazardous social media postings or what significance other data categories, like radio stations or academic research, would have. App-based smartphone monitoring is a powerful surveillance technology, but it is still unclear how exactly this data might be used to reveal the identities of these posters.
The PSB, according to the Intercept, 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.
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