U.S. Govt Investing In Pre-Crime Technology For Decades

How The Federal Government Has Been Seeking To Use Your Mind To Inform On Your Neighbors, Your Family, And Yourself For Decades

Source: Dateline Zero

The U.S. government has been increasingly interested in pre-crime technology for decades. Publicly accessible social networks are seen as only the latest tools to make that happen.

By pooling together enough human minds — through publicly accessible social networks — the government is hoping to be able to predict the future. In other words, your mind is being seen as part of a collection of intelligence resources that the government can use to predict the future crimes of your neighbors, your family, and maybe yourself.

Government Questing For Open-Source Intelligence

America’s spy services have become increasingly interested in mining “open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

DARPA had begun toying with the idea of using databases to comb publicly accessible records shortly after 9-11. The most notable was theInformation Awareness Office which was shut down in 2003 after too many politicians were freaked out by the sweeping program.

Another more interesting DARPA program (and a component of the IAO) involved using a futures market to, basically, bet on the time and the place of a terror attack. That, too, was quickly shut down.

More recently, it was reported by WIREDthat the investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community, are both funding the same startup, at the same time. The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come.

If you’re interested in learning more on this company, check out Recorded Future’s promotional video below, and/or visitwww.recordedfuture.com.

Other programs out there operate on the same premise — that by monitoring the global conversation, one might be able to predict events lingering right around the corner. And the more emotionally charged the event, the more “noise” it will generate in the global conversation. A good example of a non-government project like this would be Web Bot.

Future Attribute Screening Technology: F.A.S.T.

CNET is reporting that the latest developments, which reveal efforts to “collect, process, or retain information on” members of “the public,” came to light through an internal DHS document obtained under open-government laws by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. DHS calls its “pre-crime” system Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST.

“If it were deployed against the public, it would be very problematic,”says Ginger McCall, open government counsel at EPIC, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C.

CNET reports: “It’s unclear why the June 2010 DHS document (PDF) specified that information is currently collected or retained on members of ‘the public’ as part of FAST, and a department representative declined to answer questions that CNET posed two days ago.”

Naturally, someone from the Department of Homeland Security later issued a statement promising that “The FAST program … does not store any personally-identifiable information (PII) from participants.” Suuuuuure. We’ve heard those promises before.

What I find truly interesting about all this is how it seems that “secret” government research programs into things like remote viewing (read about the real StarGate Project) are still alive and well.

Incidentally, the StarGate Project served as inspiration for The Men Who Stare At Goats, both the book and the movie.

The basis of those program was to bet on the human mind to view events, past and present, and give the government real intelligence. Programs like that were laughed at in the past, and decried as a ridiculous waste of money. (Read this 1995 editorial that ran in Time Magazine.) But many inside the Pentagon saw these programs as an investment.

Seems that they still do.

View the full, original article HERE. Credit: D.E. Paine, and datelinezero.com.