Protective Services Battalion: The Army’s Secret Social Media Surveillance Unit
The U.S. Army Protective Services Battalion, responsible for safeguarding top military brass, has expanded its mandate to include monitoring social media for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats and identifying “negative sentiment” regarding its wards. The unit protects current as well as former high-ranking military officers from “assassination, kidnapping, injury or embarrassment,” according to Army records. The expansion of the Protective Services Battalion’s purview has not been previously reported.
The Army’s new toolkit goes far beyond social media surveillance of the type offered by private contractors like Dataminr, which helps police and military agencies detect perceived threats by scraping social media timelines and chatrooms for various keywords. Instead, Army Protective Services Battalion investigators would seemingly combine social media data with a broad variety of public and nonpublic information, all accessible through a “universal search selector.”
The Army planned to use these tools not just to detect online “threats,” but also pinpoint their exact location by combining various surveillance techniques and data sources. The document cites access to Twitter’s “firehose,” which would grant the Army the ability to search public tweets and Twitter users without restriction, as well as analysis of 4Chan, Reddit, YouTube, and Vkontakte, a Facebook knockoff popular in Russia. Internet chat platforms like Discord and Telegram will also be scoured for the purpose of “identifying counterterrorism and counter-extremism and radicalization,” though it’s unclear what exactly those terms mean here.
The Army wasn’t just looking for surveillance software, but also tools to disguise the Army’s internet presence as it monitors the web. The Army procurement document shows it wasn’t just looking for surveillance software, but also tools to disguise the Army’s internet presence as it monitors the web. The contract says the Army would use “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 its stateside origin.
The data used by the toolkit all falls under the rubric of “PAI,” or publicly available information, a misnomer that often describes not only what is freely available to the public, but also commercially purchased private information bought and sold by a wide constellation of shadowy surveillance firms and data brokers. Location data gleaned from smartphone apps and resold by the unregulated mobile ad industry provides nearly anyone — including the Army, it appears — with an effortless, unaccountable means of tracking the phone-owning public’s movements with pinpoint accuracy, both in the U.S. and abroad.
Protective details have in the past generated controversy over questions about their cost and necessity. During the Trump administration, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s around-the-clock security detail racked up over $24 million in costs. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt ran up over $3.5 million in bills for his protective detail — costs that were determined unjustified by the EPA’s inspector general. The watchdog also found that the EPA had not bothered to “assess the potential dangers posed by any of these threats” to Pruitt.
“In relation to extremist forums, Flashpoint has maintained misattributable personas for years on these platforms,” the FBI memo says. “Through these personas, Flashpoint has captured and scraped the contents of these forums.” The memo noted that the FBI “does not want to advertise they are seeking this type of data collection.”
According to the Protective Services Battalion document, the Army also does not want to advertise its interest in broad data collection. The redacted copy of the contract document, while public, is marked as CUI, for “Controlled Unclassified Information,” and FEDCON, meant for federal employees and contractors only.
“Left unregulated, open-source intelligence could lead to the kind of abuses observed in other forms of covert surveillance operations,” said Siatitsa, of Privacy International. “The systematic collection, storage, and analysis of information posted online by law enforcement and governmental agencies constitutes a serious interference with the right to respect for private life.”