The thin skinned generals over at the Pentagon apparently don't like it when
people say mean things about them on social media.
So much so that their security details scour the Internet,
looking for offensive messages after they retire.
And thankfully, we know about this, thanks to the reporting over at The Intercept.
So first, let's give a little background.
When generals enter into retirement, one of their perks is a personal security
detail that's meant to protect them from threats.
But apparently they go way further than just identifying those threats.
So let's jump into this reporting from The Intercept.
The US Army Protective Services Battalion, the Pentagon's little known Secret Service
equivalent, is tasked with safeguarding top military brass.
The unit protects current as well as former high ranking military officers from
assassination, kidnapping, injury or embarrassment, according to army records.
Protective Services mandate has expanded to include monitoring social media for
direct, indirect, unveiled threats and identifying negative sentiment
regarding its wards, according to an Army procurement document dated September 1,
2022, and reviewed by The Intercept.
Now, this document goes on to describe the software that they would use to acquire
what they would consider a reliable social media threat mitigation service.
The document says the PSIFO/PIB needs an open source, web based toolkit with
advanced capabilities to collect publicly available information.
The toolkit would provide the anonymity and security needed to conduct publicly
accessible information research through misattribution by curating user
agent strings and using various egress points globally to mask their identity.
Now, keep in mind that what's dubbed as publicly available information
isn't only what's freely available online,
it's also information that they commercially purchased,
private information that was sold by surveillance firms and data brokers.
It's not just the things you're putting out about yourself publicly online,
it's medical records that are being sold by these data brokers.
It's all sorts of invasions into your privacy.
According to The Intercept, the Army plan to use these tools not just to detect
online threats, but also pinpoint their exact location by combining
various surveillance techniques and data sources.
This document cites access to Twitter's firehouse, which would grant the army
the ability to search public tweets and Twitter users without restrictions,
as well as to do analysis of four Chan Reddit and YouTube.
And they also want tools to disguise what they're doing.
The contract says the Army would use a misattribution,
deceiving others about who is actually behind the keyboard.
The document says the Army would accomplish this through falsifying web
browser information and by relaying Army internet traffic through servers located
in foreign cities, obscuring the stateside origin.
Cenk of course I should expect this type of egregious invasion into privacy from
the United States government, but I mean,
just reading it laid out like this is mortifying.
>> Yeah, I got to be honest, I didn't expect it.
This is totally over the top.
So look, we report on their corruption all the time, in this case the Pentagon.
So for the rest of the mainstream media, that's verboten.
If the Pentagon says something, it must be true.
And you put it as the headline, you don't even question it and
the generals are God's gift to humanity.
And they talk about,
they get this basically Secret Service equivalent as a perk.
Here's another perk that they get giant contracts with military contractors,
defense contractors pay them off, not all of them, but a lot of them.
They get millions of dollars and they all know it.
They all know that's what they're gonna get if they're good boys and girls when
they're generals and stuff that Pentagon budget full of billions of dollars for
those same contractors.
So you know what there I just did a mean segment on you on YouTube, and
here I'll spare you some of the trouble we're in Los Angeles, so
you don't have to go through all of that shenanigans to figure out where we are.
So look, the only cover that I have, Ray, is that if they're looking at people who
are saying mean things about retired generals,
they're going to go to Donald Trump way before they go to me, okay?
>> Right, and they don't need any research tools to find those comments.
He's made them all over every right wing news network he could possibly get on.
And it shouldn't really be a surprise that the Pentagon was really reluctant
to respond to any substantive questions about their social media monitoring from
The Intercept.
Francis Seybold, a spokesperson for the Army Criminal Investigation Division
pointed The Intercept to a web page about the office, which has been
renamed the Executive Protection and Special Investigations Field Office.
Now, Ilya SIAT Pitts, Program Director at Privacy International, had this to say
The Intercept there may be legally valid reasons to intrude on someone's privacy
by searching for, collecting, and analyzing publicly available information,
particularly when it pertains to serious crimes and terrorist threats.
However, expressing positive or negative sentiment towards a senior high risk
individual cannot be deemed sufficient grounds for
government agencies to conduct surveillance operations,
even going as far as pinpointing exact locations of individuals.
And Cenk, if there's one thing I took away from law school, it was that if
the government says that what you're doing is a threat to national security or
public safety, that they pretty much can invade your privacy how they see fit,
and that judges will oftentimes rule with them.
And I definitely left with a bad feeling about how America views privacy law.
>> Yeah, so look, we know that they were doing massive invasion of privacy and
warrantless searches of all of us to begin with,
but this is particularly nuts because, look, if you find someone that says,
hey, I'm gonna kill a former general, go get the sons of bitches, right?
But if you're looking for information that's embarrassing or negative sentiments
are we using Secret Service like operation to protect their goddamn feelings?
I don't care about their feelings.
So this is absolutely outrageous and
exactly the kind of ridiculous crap that the Pentagon wastes our money on.
So go suck on that while you're looking at mean tweets about ex generals,
I got a lot more where that came from.
Most of them are crooks who love to take our money and
give it to the guys who then pay them off later.
So go research that.