Pentagon Makes No Secret of Wanting to Monitor Social Change Activism

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/pentagon-makes-no-secret-wanting-monitor-social-change-activism


The US military is increasingly concerned about the risks to social, political and economic stability from resource stress and climate change, and whether they might lead governments to collapse. That’s the upshot of the latest call for proposals from the Pentagon’s flagship social science research program, the Minerva Research Initiative.

Minerva is a multi-million-dollar research program led by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and founded in 2008 under the watch of then-defense secretary Robert Gates. The final deadline for submissions for the latest research round is next month.

Preparing for ‘shocks’

The research call, which was put out near the end of last year by the Office of Naval Research, shows that the Pentagon is particularly taken aback by sudden “societal shifts like those seen recently in North Africa and the Middle East,” as well as in “Central Eurasia.”

The 2011 Arab spring saw the toppling of western-backed dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, and the breakdown of Syria and Libya into protracted civil war. Various studies have repeatedly highlighted the previously overlooked role of droughts, food crises and economic problems caused by climate change in dramatically undermining the capacity of the region’s largely authoritarian states to maintain a cap on domestic grievances.

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. So, the MILITARY is concerned about citizen reaction to their thieving..that's how I read it.

They are concerned about citizen reactions to the" largely authoritarian states ", eh?

Guess it never occurs to them that if they treated these citizens better, there would be no problem.

[woo me with science]

6. +1

Actually, I think it has occurred to them. They fear that it might occur to more of us.

[woo me with science]

2. K&R Our government has chosen sides.

They have not chosen ours.

[PotatoChip]

8. Yikes.That picture speaks for itself. (nt)

[woo me with science]

3. kick

[woo me with science]

4. kick Every avenue of dissent is being systematically closed.

[woo me with science]

5. kick

[Octafish]

7. Reason for wholesale surveillance is so government can arrest a certain category.

Writing about the Third Reich, Hannah Arendt pegged our situation today.

Via Chris Hedges:

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

BTW: One company's technology helped enable both regimes, IBM.

[woo me with science]

9. kick

[woo me with science]

10. kick