We're Screwed: The New War on ISIL Will Kill Spying Reform, and Reoccupy Iraq at Giant Costs

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/world/were-screwed-new-war-isil-will-kill-spying-reform-and-reoccupy-iraq-giant-costs

s the US, Britain and France are maneuvering to escalate military action in Iraq and Syria against the ‘Islamic State’ in an operation slated to last “years,” authorities are simultaneously calling for new measures to tighten security at home to fend off the danger of jihadists targeting western homelands. Intervention abroad, policymakers are arguing, must be tied to increased domestic surveillance and vigilance. But US and British military experts warn that officials have overlooked the extent to which western policies in the region have not just stoked the rise of IS, but will continue to inflame the current crisis. The consequences could be dire – while governments exploit the turmoil in the Middle East to justify an effective re-invasion of Iraq along with intensified powers of surveillance and control – the end result could well be accelerated regional violence and increasing criminalization of Muslims and activists.

Pre-empting ‘social contagions’

In a recent article in Defense One, technology editor Patrick Tucker interviewed Dr Erin Fitzgerald, the head of the Pentagon’s controversial Minerva Research Initiative, about how Big Data analytics could have predicted the emergence of the Islamic State.

Founded in 2008, the year of the global financial crash, the Minerva initiative is a multi-million dollar programme funding social science research at universities around the world to support US defense policy. As I reported exclusively in The Guardian and Occupy.com, Minerva-funded projects have focused on studying and modeling the origins and trajectories of “social contagions” to track the propensity for civil unrest and insurgencies that could undermine US strategic interests at home and abroad.

This has included developing powerful new data-mining tools capable of in-depth analysis and automated threat-assessment of social media posts of nonviolent social movements, civil society networks, NGOs, and political activists, alongside potentially violent or extreme groups and organisations. Those algorithms, according to NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, could be used to fine-tune CIA kill lists for drone warfare at a time when the US defense industry is actively (and successfully) lobbying federal and local government to militarise the homeland with drone technology.

[djean111]

1. There was never ever going to be spying reform, love.

NSA will just get either sneakier or more brazen, and, if necessary, laws will be passed or amended in order to make this so.
ISIS is, in a way, a gift to the NSA. Big umbrella, big "justification".

[merrily]

3. Bingo, but media is not likely to tell the truth about that.

[merrily]

2. Ah, the old chicken or egg conundrum.

Which came first, our anti-terrorism wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and our actions vis a vis Arabs in general, or IS?

Which came first, our desire to gather more data than we know what to do with, or IS?

Ah, well. Moot points.

Thing is, what can/should we do about it now that does not make matters even worse as far as raising up more people and more generations who want to hurt the US and therefore USians?

Hint: more bombing of Middle Easterners is probably not going to do it. Not more extraordinary renditions or drone killings, either.

One definition of insanity is repeating the same behaviors and expecting a different result.