[Author]Could brain scan become standard procedure to see which troops might commit insider attacks?

by The Sleuth Journal[/Author]

The massive investment in neuroscience undertaken by the U.S.BRAIN project and its sister initiative the Human Brain Project is increasingly taking a turn toward the examination of mental health.

In fact, hundreds of European scientists working on the project are threatening a boycott because of this direction. In their view, the initial directive was to be more focused on repairing organic injuries and disorders such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and physical brain damage sustained in accidents. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would be one area that might involve the military.

However, there is a disturbing trend developing in law enforcement and medicine to use what has been learned about the human brain in order to adopt pre-crime systems and predictive behavior technology.

But could a brain scan become standard procedure to see which troops might be inclined to commit insider attacks?

Troops overseas have been working alongside Iraqi and Afghan troops for years, but a new interest is being taken in evaluating potential extremists who are infiltrating to kill from within.

The numbers of these incidents are statistically low as reported by Defense One, which cites the inside killing of “several troops in recent years.” But a former Army counterintelligence agent sees the opportunity to apply new technology that presumably can screen people for mal-intent. The system is called HandShake.

Here’s how the HandShake system works: A U.S. soldier would take, say, an Iraqi officer and outfit the subject with a special helmet that can pick up both electromagnetic signals (EEG) and perform functional near-infrared imaging (fNIRs) which images blood flow changes in the brain. The soldier would put the subject through a battery of tests including image recognition. Most of the pictures in the tests would be benign, but a few would contain scenes that a potential insider threat would remember, possibly including faces, locations or even bomb parts. The key is to select these images very, very carefully to cut down on the potential false positives.

When you recognize a picture that’s of emotional significance to you, your brain experiences a 200 to 500 microsecond hiccup, during which the electromagnetic activity drops, measurable via EEG. The reaction, referred to as the P300 response, happens too fast for the test subject to control, so the subject can’t game the system.

The fNIR readings back up the EEG numbers. Together, they speak to not only whether or not a subject is a traitor but how likely an individual is to act on potentially criminal or treasonous impulses. The system then runs all the data through what Veritas calls a Friend or Foe Algorithm. The output: the ability to pinpoint an insider’s threat potential with 80 to 90 percent accuracy, according to the company.

It’s obviously ironic that this system is intended to be used on people who never should have encountered the U.S. military in the first place, since the U.S. military arrived based on lies. Moreover, to those flagged by such a system, they are clearly open to being tortured under the policies that have been established in the War on Terror world in which we live.

This system comes at an expense in excess of $1 million dollars to deploy and $500,000 per month thereafter, per site, according to the company’s founder. Both the monetary cost and the ethical costs should ensure that this technology never sees the light of day. However, the military-industrial complex has a provable track record of caring very little about either.

Note: The article linked below demonstrates how the biometric identification system in Afghanistan already has trickled down to the streets of America. If brain scanning technology is successful overseas, it is guaranteed to show up inside the United States. It’s already been proposed for air travel and other applications under theFAST system (Future Attribute Screening Technology). Additionally, with the increased war on whistleblowers, this would be a wonderful tool for employers to weed out those whose desire is not to undermine, but simply to expose criminality.

It’s obviously ironic that this system is intended to be used on people who never should have encountered the U.S. military in the first place, since the U.S. military arrived based on lies. Moreover, to those flagged by such a system, they are clearly open to being tortured under the policies that have been established in the War on Terror world in which we live.

This system comes at an expense in excess of $1 million dollars to deploy and $500,000 per month thereafter, per site, according to the company’s founder. Both the monetary cost and the ethical costs should ensure that this technology never sees the light of day. However, the military-industrial complex has a provable track record of caring very little about either.

Note: The article linked below demonstrates how the biometric identification system in Afghanistan already has trickled down to the streets of America. If brain scanning technology is successful overseas, it is guaranteed to show up inside the United States. It’s already been proposed for air travel and other applications under theFAST system (Future Attribute Screening Technology). Additionally, with the increased war on whistleblowers, this would be a wonderful tool for employers to weed out those whose desire is not to undermine, but simply to expose criminality.

Real-Time Facial Recognition Offered to Police in New Program

by Nicholas West

Activist Post

The San Diego Police Department is reporting their involvement in the largest facial recognition program to date. It is something straight out of theaters of war, but is set to hit the streets of America in the very near future if all goes according to plan.

Facial recognition technology, and the databases that catalog and store the results, is advancing at a pace that is difficult to contain. In 2006, the performance of face recognition algorithms were evaluated in the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC). High-resolution face images, 3-D face scans, and iris images were used in the tests. The results indicated that the new algorithms are 10 times more accurate than the face recognition algorithms of 2002 and 100 times more accurate than those of 1995. Some of the algorithms were able to outperform human participants in recognizing faces and could uniquely identify identical twins. (Source) And that was 2006.

One of the latest military-grade systems can now scan 36 million faces per second, or every face in the U.S. within 10 seconds. It is a technology that has trickled down from use in war zones like Afghanistan to catalog potential terrorists, to U.S. border control applications for combating illegal immigration, to FBI crime detection, to post-riot analysis, and right on down to establishing personal ID for a wide range of private companies.

One of the more troubling aspects of what the San Diego PD is looking to implement is that it will be used on the presumably innocent until proven guilty.

We reported in August that the new iPhones had an embedded code for a biometric kit including a fingerprint censor among other features.

[Author]Researcher who worked on social media experiment was funded by DoD

by Steve Watson[/Author]

Facebook’s controversial “emotional study”, which subjected over half a million unwitting users of the social network to a psychological conditioning experiment, has direct ties to research funded by the Department of Defense concerning the likelihood of civil unrest.

The Facebook scandal hit the headlines this week, as it was revealed that the company participated with a federally funded UCSF study into how emotions can be swayed on social media by controlling the content of personal feeds and deciding whether to show negative or positive material.

While that fact in itself is disturbing, it seems that the rabbit hole goes even deeper.

Bloggers and online sleuths have since highlighted that the research appears to be at least in part connected to a Pentagon-led project called the Minerva Initiative.

Researcher and London Guardian writer Nafeez Ahmed has noted that the project provides “funding to universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.”

In other words, the DoD wants to master how to predict, prevent, manipulate, control, and even instigate mass civil unrest. It wishes to do this by developing “operational tools” related to “social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces.”

The initiative seeks to provide authoritative knowledge on “social movement mobilisation and contagions”. Social networks including Facebook and Twitter are highlighted as key indicators in the research.

It has been noted that within the official credits for the controversial study recently conducted by Facebook, Cornell University’s Jeffrey T. Hancock is listed as an author. Hancock is also listed on the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative website, where it is noted that he received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”.

The section of the website devoted to that study includes a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

This is not the only connection Cornell University has to the Pentagon civil unrest study. There is a second project listed on the funding page of the Minerva website entitled “Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions”.

The US government in conjunction with the military has long been concerned with studying the potential for civil unrest and how it can control, facilitate and combat it. The U.S. Army War College, in conjunction with numerous think tanks have somewhat obsessively studied the subject for years.

In recent years, the rise of social media, and its potential use for growing and organising protest movements, has spurred a new urgency within government and the military to adapt to and co-opt such tools.

The so-called “spring” revolutions of recent years have been heavily centered around the use of social media, with many even suggesting that Western government and military forces have, at least in part, controlled and even initiated unrest in other parts of the world for strategic purposes by employing social media.

Reports have recently emerged of the Military setting up fake Twitter-like social networks in countries such as Cuba, in order to manipulate and sway popular opinion there. The Military also developed so called ‘sock puppet’ software to create fake online identities and spread propaganda at home and abroad.

The government has also heavily invested in companies that monitor social media and track how opinions and information spreads on such networks.

Facebook was and is deeply connected to the NSA’s PRISM program. Via leaked information, and by the NSA’s own admission, it has been noted that Facebook not only knew about, but also cooperated with the mass spying program. The NSA even masqueraded as Facebook via fake servers, using them as a launching pad to grab information from hard drives, in order to infect millions of computers around the world with malware as part of the mass surveillance program.

The trend is clear – the government and the military have set about fully co-opting social media and turning it into a tool for social control and manipulation, and Facebook has cooperated in the process.  Infowars.com

In another big brother control of the population news:

SWAT teams avoid transparency by registering as private corporations

by Steve Straehley

Federal funding, along with giveaways of surplus equipment from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have caused local police departments to become more militarized. Nowhere is this clearer than in the overuse of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams by law enforcement in day-to-day policing. Now, some agencies are trying to make SWAT operations more opaque by registering them as private corporations.

In Massachusetts, many SWAT teams are run by law enforcement councils (LEC). These groups get their funding from police agencies in their region and are run by a board of directors that’s usually composed of chiefs from participating departments. But although they’re funded by tax dollars, and their personnel are members of public law-enforcement agencies, some of these LECs hide behind corporate identities when public records requests are made.

Those LECs have incorporated under the 501(c)(3) section of the tax code and claim that they’re exempt from public records requests, according to Radley Balko of The Washington Post. The status of these SWAT teams, which number about 240 of the state’s 351 such groups, came to light when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attempted to obtain public records for a report about the militarization of American police agencies. The LECs simply refused to deal with the requests, saying they weren’t obligated to provide records.

The ACLU has responded by filing suit against one LEC, the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC). “NEMLEC can’t have it both ways,” ACLU of Massachusetts staff attorney Jessie Rossman said in a statement. “Either it is a public entity subject to public records laws, or what it is doing is illegal.”

But keeping records out of the public eye is a good way for LECs to deal with incidents such as one in which Eurie Stamp, a 68-year-old grandfather of 12, was shot and killed by a SWAT team that came to a Framingham, Massachusetts, house to arrest his girlfriend’s son. The suspect was arrested outside the house, but police stormed in anyway, and Stamp died after an officer’s gun went off.

The ACLU study showed that SWAT teams are twice as likely to enter a home during a drug sweep as they are for other deployments. In addition, half of all SWAT deployments come against black or Latino subjects. Only 20 percent come against white subjects; the race of the remainder of the subjects is unknown.

Another salient point from the ACLU report was the increasing use of military-style equipment by SWAT teams. Many teams, even those connected with small cities, are obtaining from federal surplus or purchasing items such as assault rifles, battle dress uniforms and even armored personnel carriers, such as the one used by Ohio State University to monitor football game day activities.