The Pentagon has begun to monitor online tweets and comments about senior military officials in a surveillance effort that provides the U.S. Army’s ‘Protective Services Battalion’ the authority to directly pinpoint anyone’s location.
The Protective Services Battalion – the Pentagon‘s equivalent to the Secret Service – was initially tasked with safeguarding high-ranking military officers from “assassination, kidnapping, injury or embarrassment,” however, has seen its ambit has since expanded to include monitoring social media for “negative sentiment” regarding its leaders or “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats.
An Army procurement document, dated September 1, 2022, details how the battalion uses “tools” and “misattribution” to disguise its internet presence while monitoring content on the internet, with investigators being able to combine social media data with both public and confidential information, accessible through a “universal search selector.”
The document adds that the Pentagon has access to Twitter’s “firehose,” allowing the army to search tweets without restriction, as well as other websites, including 4Chan, Reddit, and YouTube to identify “counterterrorism and counter-extremism and radicalization.”
If online threats are detected, the Pentagon’s battalion can pinpoint one’s specific location through “various surveillance techniques and data sources.”
As stated by Ilia Siatitsa, program director at Privacy International, “expressing ‘positive or negative sentiment towards a senior high-risk individual’ cannot be deemed sufficient grounds for government agencies to conduct surveillance operations.”
“The ability to express opinions, criticize, make assumptions, or form value judgments — especially regarding public officials — is a quintessential part of [a] democratic society,” Siatitsa added.
