CIA-Backed Surveillance Tool 'Geofeedia' Was Marketed To Public Schools

[DamianTV]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/10/18/230257/cia-backed-surveillance-tool-geofeedia-was-marketed-to-public-schools


An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Dot:

An online surveillance tool that enabled hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies to track and collect information on social media users was also marketed for use in American public schools, the Daily Dot has learned. Geofeedia sold surveillance software typically bought by police to a high school in a northern Chicago suburb, less than 50 miles from where the company was founded in 2011. An Illinois school official confirmed the purchase of the software by phone on Monday. In the fall of 2014, the Lincolnshire-Prairie School District paid Geofeedia $10,000 to monitor the social media posts of children at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. "We did have for one year a contract with Geofeedia," said Jim Conrey, a spokesperson for Lincolnshire-Prairie School District. "We were mostly interested in the possibility of trying to prevent any kind of harm, either that students would do to themselves or to other students." Conrey said the district simply wanted to keep its students safe. "It was really just about student safety; if we could try to head off any potential dangerous situations, we thought it might be worth it," he said. Ultimately, the school found little use for the platform, which was operated by police liaison stationed on school grounds, and chose not to renew its subscription after the first year, citing cost and a lack of actionable information. "A lot of kids that were posting stuff that we most wanted, they weren't doing the geo-tagging or making it public," Conrey said. "We weren't really seeing a lot there." The school's experience, added Conrey, was that more often than not students would approach school administrators with sensitive issues, as opposed to the school unearthing problems affecting students using Geofeedia. "Quite frankly, we found that it wasn't worth the money," Conrey said.

Ooooooh, now the CIA needs to watch your children too! After all, all children are GOVT PROPERTY. Dont you just feel so much safer?

/sarcasm

NOTE: /sarcasm comments are practically required as so many people no longer understand what sarcasm is.

[phill4paul]

The sooner a solar EMP hits the sooner we can go back to freedom.

[Suzanimal]

"A lot of kids that were posting stuff that we most wanted, they weren't doing the geo-tagging or making it public,"

Kids are quick learners.

[Zippyjuan]

So one school in Chicago tried it and said it wasn't any good.


"Quite frankly, we found that it wasn't worth the money," Conrey said.

[presence]

but your homeschool child won't be properly "socialized"

[DamianTV]

So one school in Chicago tried it and said it wasn't any good.

WHy do you continue to completely miss the point of Intrusive Govt? Shit like this should NEVER happen, period.

[Indy Vidual]

What does "Geofeedia" do that Google doesn't?

[CPUd]

WHy do you continue to completely miss the point of Intrusive Govt? Shit like this should NEVER happen, period.

Let them buy into shitty products, they will prove to be ineffective and make them think twice before jumping on that bandwagon again in the near future.

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

So one school in Chicago tried it and said it wasn't any good.

If you go to the company website, you'll see the category Education is one of their 4 customer categories. Another is Public Sector.

I'm guessing this product is fairly new. I am also guessing they charged quite a bit of money to this school. I worked in sales for three companies and this is typically how it works. You go in with a really high price on new product. Your customer decides they were drastically overcharged. The company adjusts its price.

Their website suggests they are marketing a bit to schools, which includes colleges.

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

So one school in Chicago tried it and said it wasn't any good.

Oh yeah; neg rep.

[timosman]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/your-government-wants-to-militarize-social-media-to-influence-your-beliefs


November 14, 2016

A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces.

The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion.

A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month revealed how a CIA-funded tool, Geofeedia, was already being used by police to conduct surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters.

Although Facebook and Twitter both quickly revoked Geofeedia’s access to their social feeds, the conference proves that social media surveillance remains a rapidly growing industry with no regulatory oversight. And its biggest customers are our own governments.

The event, the Sixth Annual Conference on Social Media Within the Defence and Military Sector, is sponsored by the Thales Group, the tenth largest defense company in the world, which is partially owned by the French government.

Participants in the conference—chaired by Steven Mehringer, Head of Communication Services at NATO—will include military and intelligence leaders from around the world, especially “social media experts from across the armed forces and defense industry.”


http://motherboard-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/39495/1479062776633412.png

PROPAGANDA AT HOME

One panel to be delivered by the Heads of Digital of the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force, is titled ‘Maximising Media Support to Armed Forces Activities Within the UK’, and will explore: “How changing perceptions of social media are enhancing media operations at home.”

The panel will also discuss how the UK military can “maintain a wide reach over a valid audience with reduced costs.”

“Social Media is increasingly important to the portrayal of armed forces, at home and abroad on operations; raising awareness of institutional issues; and gaining support through successful recruitment campaigns,” said conference Chairman, NATO’s Steven Mehringer, in an invitation brochure for the event.

PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE

The military’s goal of using social media to influence the beliefs of populations to win wars is alluded to in the description of other panels. A proposed panel titled ‘NATO’s Digital Outreach: Creating a Global Conversation’, describes NATO’s aim of “cultivating a global audience through social media to support The Alliance.”

Another panel discussion makes direct reference to the role of social media in covert US military ‘psychological warfare’ operations—i.e. propaganda—as well as the use of social media to support mass surveillance.

Titled, ‘Using Social Media in Conjunction with Other Information Warfare Systems to Deliver Desired Effects’, the program description reads:

“Coordination efforts with PsyOps - Manipulation [of] the mind-set of the enemy virtually

Social media as an open source intelligence asset - finding the information hiding in plain sight

A possible gateway for Computer Networks Operations? Opening the web to Cyberwarfare.”

Presenters for the panel are listed as NATO’s Steven Mehringer; Ben Heap, Senior Expert, NATO Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) Centre of Excellence; and Brad Kimberly, the Pentagon’s Director of Social Media and Defense Media Activity.

REAL TIME SURVEILLANCE

The sole sponsor of the event, Thales, is a major player in the development of new technologies analyzing social media for military and intelligence use.

From 2013 to 2015, Thales partnered with the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada and MediaMiser, an Ottawa-based media monitoring company, to develop tools for security agencies “to automatically process the huge amounts of textual information circulating at any given time, in any number of languages, on blogs, news feeds, social networks and the like.”

The research project, ‘Countering Security Threats using Natural Language Technology’, was funded by the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP), itself funded by the Canadian defense department’s Defense Research and Development Agency.

According to a description of the project on the Thales website, the partners have created a demonstrator tool that is currently being tested with users from security organisations. They said the “Initial feedback is very positive.”

The tool is all about “real-time surveillance”: social media information coming into the system is “immediately analysed” using Big Data algorithms and techniques “to detect changes, trends or anomalies” and “identify potentially dangerous entities”.

The tool is already so powerful, claims Thales, that it takes just 5 to 10 seconds for new information appearing on the web “to show up in the system, so intelligence analysts have up-to-the minute insights into situations as they evolve.”

The current dataset has some 70 million documents, with 25,000 new documents added daily, and search results delivered in less than 5 seconds.

Media Miser extracts and filters data on a particular topic as soon as it is posted online. Tools developed by the NRC process this content in real time by translating and summarising the data. The information is then assigned various ratings and descriptions: a tone rating (positive, negative, neutral); signs of emotion (anger, fear, etc.); the geographic location of the source; and the identities of the individuals or groups involved in the making and distributing the content.

All this metadata is stored, along with the content itself, within a system controlled by Thales, where users from the defense and security sectors can use special visualisation widgets to access and explore the information. Widgets include map views, timelines, and network topologies, which can be used to show connections between “documents, people, events, regions or groups”.

Thales did not respond to a request from Motherboard for information on its current government contracts for social media surveillance technology. But its ‘Countering Security Threats’ project provides insight into the Big Brother vision of social media that will be discussed at the upcoming conference in London.

WINNING OVER THE NATIVES

The conference agenda also shows that social media is seen as an effective propaganda tool for the US military even in remote regions, where the use of social media is limited.

Africa, for instance, is the subject of a panel titled ‘Using Social Media to Reach Diverse Audiences: US Africa Command’, to be presented by Nathan Herring, Social Media Manager for US AFRICOM. But only 9% of the population of the entire continent have access to social media.

Nevertheless, the panel summary explains that the US military’s goal is “reaching audiences in areas where social media is still an emerging technology” and “getting the right message to the right audience.”

As far as military forces around the world are concerned, social media is a new battleground that must be monitored to identify actual and potential enemies, collect intelligence, and influence opinions—but the risk is that what we post everyday is increasingly part of a war being fought without our knowledge or consent.

[DamianTV]

... to which I respond:

'Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.'
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/11/21/1626254/quit-social-media-your-career-may-depend-on-it

... and posted in Privacy & Data Security...
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?504486-Quit-Social-Media-Your-Career-May-Depend-on-It-(nytimes-com)

[DamianTV]

UPDATE

Surveillance Firm 'Geofeedia' Cuts Half of Staff After Losing Access To Twitter, Facebook
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/11/22/2146252/surveillance-firm-geofeedia-cuts-half-of-staff-after-losing-access-to-twitter-facebook


In mid-October, an American Civil Liberties Union issued a report accusing police of using Geofeedia -- a CIA-backed social-media monitoring platform -- to track protests and other large gatherings. As a result, Instagram, Facebook and eventually, Twitter cut the company off from its valuable data stream, causing them to cut half of their staff to "focus on a variety of innovations" that will allow them to serve their customers and continue their "rapid growth trajectory as a leading real-time analytics and alerting platform." Chicago Tribune reports:

Geofeedia cut the jobs, mostly in sales in the Chicago office, in the third week of October, the spokesman said. It has offices in Chicago, Indianapolis and Naples, Fla. The cuts were first reported by Crain's Chicago Business. An emailed statement attributed to CEO Phil Harris said Geofeedia wasn't "created to impact civil liberties," but in the wake of the public debate over their product, they're changing the company's direction. Harris said Geofeedia's software has been "impactful" for schools, sports leagues, customer service, marketing and event planning, per the statement. He also referred to the company's $17 million funding round in February -- which brought its total funding to nearly $24 million -- and "strong sales and growth" as strengthening the company. "Our strong financial position has allowed us to carefully consider the appropriate areas of focus for our technology going forward," Harris wrote in the statement.