Social science is being militarised to target peaceful activists and protest movements

This is from the opening sentence in a truly eye-opening article by the Guardian's Nafeez Ahmed, in his 12 June 2014 piece,
"Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown".

Link to full article

The Minerva Initiative research program tasks 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."

Sounds like a smart idea, if it is targeted at our enemies, right?

What about environmental activists, peaceful demonstrators, or politically fed-up Americans?

Yes, we are the subjects of the modeling & applications, too.
(I realize this is neither news, nor a conspiracy to well read ATS members)

Among the projects:

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."

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves.

When journalist, Nafeez Ahmed asked the principal investigator of this last study, why peaceful protesters were equated with supporters of political violence, he received no reply.


The article also talks about Dr. David Price, and his uncovering of the U.S. military "weaponizing anthropology". He wrote a great article detailing war games that target domestic environmental protesters. Read it here

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

The headlines everyday point to it, as does this Guardian article:
the people running the show expect societal breakdown in America, in the near future.


Back in November of 2012, member & moderator Hefficide authored a brilliant thread, found here, discussing behavior modeling by the US Defense department under the OSD Human Social Cultural Behavior Modeling Program and its joint project, The Minerva Initiative.

Heff's presentation is second-to-none, and I am not able to improve upon it.
For background information, and to see what the ATS community's thoughts were, give it a read. It's interesting to see how opinions have crystallized in just 18 months.

Treating peaceful protesters as enemy combatants is nothing new in this country, nothing new in this world.

The hippies, as annoying and wrong-headed as they were, were hardly what one would call violent rebels. But anti-war groups led by them were infiltrated by the hundreds and they were brutally dealt with by the thousands.

The Civil Rights movement was met with water cannons and attack dogs.

The history of this country is written in the blood of peaceful protesters, so none of this should come as a shock.

In a nation founded by dissenters we now have a Federal Government that is the enemy of the people. This is the exact reason our founding fathers envisioned a situation where an armed populace would one day need to overthrow a draconian Government no longer of the people and by the people.

RIP USA

The Tree Of Liberty, must, of nessessity, be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants alike.............
from time to time....
A very prescient thought....expressed right off the bat......what about that statement doesn't the public get?

a reply to: AnIntellectualRedneck

Agreed. Stomping on domestic dissent is nothing new.

I guess what alarmed me (it shouldn't have), is the systematic and compartmentalized nature of the research.

The military is trying to legitimize the funding by now having oversight by the NSF (National Science Foundation). Each university is doing a small portion of the research, which standing alone, doesn't seem particularly ominous. It also probably hinders any one group of researchers from thinking, "Hey, is this moral, ethical?"

Since STEM researchers have been the beneficiaries of the MIC's copious funding over past decades, I can imagine the Social Science grad students & professors are frothing-at-the-mouth to get these grants. They either don't realize or don't care how their bought & paid research will be used.

a reply to: Olivine
COOP?

black and white?

Anyone besides me think that social media, conspiracy sites, or the www in general just might be the most fantastic
mechanism to engineer cultural meme, track malcontents and propagandize. Do you think tptb are just ignoring this fantastic resource for manipulation and control?

Anonymity............don't make me laugh!

a reply to: Olivine

Fascism rising.

Agree with central command or be put in a dungeon or summarily executed.

Praise Lenin.