Comment: from Kevin Flaherty of cryptogon.com:
That part of the focus here is protest movements isn’t news.
I read, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping by Frank Kitson when I was in college back in the early 1990s and the book was a couple of decades old even then.
Summary: Start gathering information on people involved in protest movements before they turn into insurgents.
In the U.S., COINTELPRO and other similar programs are standard operating procedure and have been for decades. Governments employ countless numbers of people who are tasked with infiltrating, discrediting, surveiling and otherwise rendering useless protest movements.
Also, the U.S. has had multiple martial law contingency plans in place at least as far back as the 1980s. See REX84, Garden Plot, NSPD-51.
So, a more appropriate headline might be, “Pentagon Has Been Preparing for Mass Civil Breakdown for Decades.”
------------------------------------------
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed
The Guardian
Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."
Launched in 2008 - the year of the global banking crisis - the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."
Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."
Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.
Read more
That part of the focus here is protest movements isn’t news.
I read, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping by Frank Kitson when I was in college back in the early 1990s and the book was a couple of decades old even then.
Summary: Start gathering information on people involved in protest movements before they turn into insurgents.
In the U.S., COINTELPRO and other similar programs are standard operating procedure and have been for decades. Governments employ countless numbers of people who are tasked with infiltrating, discrediting, surveiling and otherwise rendering useless protest movements.
Also, the U.S. has had multiple martial law contingency plans in place at least as far back as the 1980s. See REX84, Garden Plot, NSPD-51.
So, a more appropriate headline might be, “Pentagon Has Been Preparing for Mass Civil Breakdown for Decades.”
------------------------------------------
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed
The Guardian
Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."
Launched in 2008 - the year of the global banking crisis - the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."
Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."
Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.
Read more
No comments:
Post a Comment