Post-9/11 technology used to track ISIS now used to track misinformation

In post-9/11 America, the federal government has been developing technology designed to destroy liberty in the name of “safety.” Now we learn it has been funneling millions of dollars in taxpayer money to universities, private companies, and Big Tech to form a partnership and expand an Artificial Intelligence (AI) censorship program once used to track ISIS and use it to spy on American citizens in order to track and silence “misinformation.”

The goal of the censorship program is to make it easier for government to track so-called misinformation and silence American dissent on issues like COVID vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts (via JustTheNews.com):

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program.

DARPA said those tools were used “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information,” beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago.

The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms.

Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled a report detailing how this technology is being developed to manipulate the speech of Americans via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations.

“DARPA’s been funding an AI network using the science of social media mapping dating back to at least 2011-2012, during the Arab Spring abroad and during the Occupy Wall Street movement here at home,” Benz told Just The News. “They then bolstered it during the time of ISIS to identify homegrown ISIS threats in 2014-2015.”

The new version of this technology, he added, is openly targeting two groups: Those wary of potential adverse effects from the COVID-19 vaccine and those skeptical of recent U.S. election results. (Emphasis mine)

The connection between developing post-9/11 technology to spy on ISIS and then using it as a censorship program to track and silence so-called COVID “misinformation” is something I warned would happen.

In a piece I wrote in March 2020 about coronavirus being the end of liberty and the beginning of tyranny, I referenced an article written by John Whitehead, the founder and president of the Rutherford Institute. It was Whitehead’s contention at the time (and mine as well) that COVID tyranny would ultimately lead to the creation of a full-blown police state.

“This coronavirus epidemic, which has brought China’s Orwellian surveillance out of the shadows and caused Italy to declare a nationwide lockdown, threatens to bring the American Police State out into the open on a scale we’ve not seen before.

“If and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits — if and when we are forced to shelter in place — if and when militarized police are patrolling the streets — if and when security checkpoints have been established — if and when the media’s ability to broadcast the news has been curtailed by government censors — if and when public systems of communication (phone lines, internet, text messaging, etc.) have been restricted — if and when those FEMA camps the government has been surreptitiously building finally get used as quarantine detention centers for American citizens — if and when military “snatch and grab” teams are deployed on local, state, and federal levels as part of the activated Continuity of Government plans to isolate anyone suspected of being infected with COVID-19 — and if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public — then we will truly understand the extent to which the government has fully succeeded in recalibrating our general distaste for anything that smacks too overtly of tyranny.

“This is how it begins.”

It’s an indisputable fact that 9/11-inspired tyranny grew in leaps and bounds during the so-called pandemic. Socialist ideals such as prison reform, so-called gun control, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal experienced major advances.

9/11 brought us the PATRIOT Act, so it was with a bit of irony that COVID tyranny brought us a Patriot Act for healthcare, a plan created by Donald Trump’s advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Under his plan, a government/private sector partnership was formed to create a new “surveillance and data collection system” used to track coronavirus Americans.

Apple and Google began developing new hardware and software that gave Kushner exactly what he wanted. Sure, the two tech giants assured America that their tracking system would completely protect privacy, but protecting privacy was never the prime directive. The whole point of creating a Patriot Act for healthcare was to make the names, phone numbers, and locations of nearly every American available to the government in real-time.

Parts of Kushner’s plan were realized in the form of vaccine passports. In March 2021, we learned that digital COVID vaccine passports were being jointly developed by a group of health and technology companies under the belief that governments and businesses would eventually require proof of being vaccinated before being allowed to return to “normal.”

In July 2021 we learned how vaccine passports were being used as a model to replace the credit report system with a totalitarian “social credit system” like the one used in Communist China. Some of the areas tracked in real time by China’s “social credit system” are:

• Medical history
• Social media posts and internet search history
• Bank accounts and credit cards
• Residence, employment, and criminal history
• Relationships and religious activities
• Political activity

This information is continuously fed to a central database where it is used to create a “social credit score” that is used to reward or punish citizens.

In the weeks leading up to the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in 2021, Joe Biden identified a new terrorist threat: Americans exercising their God-given, constitutionally protected right to free speech to criticize government’s COVID policies. In a terrorism threat advisory released at the time by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined that people pushing “anti-government rhetoric” — including people standing in “opposition to COVID measures” — are “domestic terrorists.”

The advisory lumped people exercising their free speech rights via online forums, people who disagree with COVID restrictions, and Al-Qaeda into one all-encompassing category. In the eyes of Joe Biden, exercising your free speech right to protest masks and vaccine mandates and/or using social media to do so means you’re no different than the terrorists who crashed planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Momentum is clearly on the government’s side to continue destroying liberty in the name of “safety.” This is why post-9/11 Washington has been unabashedly expanding the Artificial Intelligence (AI) censorship program once used to track ISIS to spy on American citizens and use that technology to silence “misinformation.”

Destroying liberty has become standard operating procedure in Washington. Welcome to the “new normal.”

 

---

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

Follow the Strident Conservative on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to receive podcasts of his daily radio feature: iTunes | Stitcher | Tune In | iHeart | RSS

For media inquiries or to have David speak to your group, use the Contact Us form.