Story of a War Foretold: Why We're Fighting ISIS
Story of a War Foretold: Why We're Fighting ISIS
Tuesday, 30 September 2014 11:07
By Nafeez Ahmed, Ceasefire Magazine | News Analysis
As the US, UK and French governments escalate military action in Iraq and Syria against the ‘Islamic State’, in an operation slated to last “years,” they are moving fast to justify the need for mass surveillance measures at home, while neutering calls for surveillance reform.
The end result could well be accelerated regional violence and increasing criminalisation of Muslims and activists in the West.
Intervention abroad, policymakers are arguing, must be tied to increased domestic surveillance and vigilance at home.
But US and British military experts warn that officials have overlooked the extent to which western policies in the region have not just stoked the rise of IS, but will continue to inflame the current crisis. The consequences could be dire – while governments exploit the turmoil in the Middle East to justify an effective re-invasion of Iraq along with intensified powers of surveillance and control – the end result could well be accelerated regional violence and increasing criminalization of Muslims and activists.
Pre-Empting "Social Contagions"
In a recent article in Defense One, technology editor Patrick Tucker interviewed Dr Erin Fitzgerald, the head of the Pentagon’s controversial Minerva Research Initiative, about how
Big Data analytics could have predicted the emergence of the Islamic State.
Founded in 2008, the year of the global financial crash, the Minerva initiative is a multi-million dollar programme funding social science research at universities around the world to support US defence policy. As I reported exclusively in The Guardian and Occupy.com, Minerva-funded projects have focused on studying and modelling the origins and trajectories of “social contagions” to track the propensity for civil unrest and insurgencies that could undermine US strategic interests at home and abroad.
This has included developing powerful new data-mining tools capable of in-depth analysis and automated threat-assessment of social media posts by nonviolent social movements, civil society networks, NGOs, and political activists, as well as potentially those by violent or extreme groups and organisations.
These algorithms, according to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, could be used, for instance, to fine-tune CIA kill lists for drone warfare at a time when the US defence industry is actively (and successfully) lobbying federal and local government to militarise the homeland with drone technology.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/26517-story-of-a-war-foretold-why-we-re-fighting-isis
