Tag: psyops

Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That’s when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns.

They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints?

To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital library and indexing system – using the internet as its backbone – were dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that would track user movements online.

Those disbursements, together with $4.5 million in grants from a multi-agency consortium including NASA and DARPA, became the seed funding that was used to establish Google.

Eventually MDDS was integrated into DARPA’s global eavesdropping and data-mining activities that would attempt total information awareness over US citizens. Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had on the social sphere.   But the story does not begin with Google, nor the military origins of the internet, it goes back much further in time, to the dawn of counterinsurgency and PSYOPs during the second world war.

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Mother, 32, who became face of Chicago Teachers Union’s push to keep schools closed after they claimed she died of COVID caught from student actually DRANK herself to death, medical examiner reveals

A Chicago mother who the teachers’ union claimed died when a COVID-positive student was sent home to quarantine as they rallied for more COVID protocols actually died of alcoholism, it emerged on Monday. 

Denisha Henry, the 32-year-old mother of an eighth-grade student at Jensen Elementary Scholastic Academy in the East Garfield Park district of Chicago, died on September 24.

The day before, Shenitha Curry, 44, had died of pneumonia from COVID, with diabetes and hypertension as contributing factors. She was not vaccinated.

Soon after, the Chicago Teachers’ Union claimed at a rally that both mothers caught COVID from a child at the school, where 11 out of 17 classrooms were in quarantine.

But according to a Cook County Medical Examiner’s report obtained by Chicago City Wire on Monday, Henry actually died of chronic ethanolism – a term coroners use to describe someone who died of alcoholism.

Now, parents in the Chicago Public School system say the teachers’ union should be ashamed for misrepresenting her death in an effort to deride the school system for its handling of the pandemic.

‘My God, the burden they placed on those young children who lost their mothers. Telling them basically you killed your mothers by going to school,’ one parent, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution, said.

‘Shame on them. This proves they’ll stop at nothing to get what they want.’ 

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How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

If insurgency is defined as an organised political struggle by a hostile minority, attempting to seize power through revolutionary means, then counterinsurgency is the military doctrine historically used against non-state actors, which sets out to infiltrate and eradicate those movements.

Unlike conventional soldiers, insurgents are considered dangerous, not because of their physical presence on the battlefield, but because of their ideology.

As David Galula, a French commander who was an expert in counterinsurgency warfare during the Algerian War, emphasised:

“In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The technique of power consists in relying on the favourable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralise or eliminate the hostile minority.”

Over time, however, the intelligence state lost touch with reality, as the focus of its counterinsurgency programs shifted from foreign to domestic populations, from national security risks to ordinary citizens, particularly in the wake of 9/11 when the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, began mapping out the Internet.

Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, we now know that the NSA were collecting 200 billion pieces of data every month, including the cell phone records, emails, Web searches and live chats of more than 200 million ordinary Americans. This was extracted from the world’s largest Internet companies via a lesser-known data mining program called Prism.

There’s another name for this, and its total information awareness; the highest attainment of a paranoid state seeking absolute control over its population. What ceases to be worth the candle is that people’s right to privacy is enshrined under the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

Few understand how lockdowns are ripples on these troubled waters. Decades of counterinsurgency waged against one subset of society, branded insurgents for their Marxist ideals has, over time, shifted to anyone holding anti-establishment views. The predictive policing of track and trace and the theory of asymptomatic transmission are the unwelcome repercussions of the intelligence state seeking total information awareness over its citizens.

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