Legendary American general George S Patton famously slapped a soldier for crying, calling him a “yellow bastard”. As for the enemy, Patton threatened to “rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks”. Then-General George Washington, arriving at the Battle of Princeton and finding it already lost and his regiment fleeing, rallied the troops and led them (quite literally leading them) to victory.
What would those legends would make of a bunch of panty-waists who are scared of being “embarrassed”? Such precious little petals that they need a whole secret police to try and stop people saying meany-mean things about them?
The U.S. Army’s Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s equivalent of the Secret Service, now monitors social media to see if anyone has posted negative comments about the country’s highest-ranking officers.
Could you possibly imagine Douglas MacArthur, “Black Jack” Pershing or Ike Eisenhower giving a rat’s arse about what a civilian thought of them?
An Army procurement document from 2022 obtained by the Intercept reveals that the PSB now monitors social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers under its protection, as well as for “direct, indirect and veiled” threats.
“This is an ongoing PSIFO/PIB” – Protective Services Field Office/Protective Intelligence Branch – “requirement to provide global protective services for senior Department of Defense (DoD) officials, adequate security in order to mitigate online threats (direct, indirect, and veiled), the identification of fraudulent accounts and positive or negative sentiment relating specifically to our senior high-risk personnel.”
And they won’t just spy on gossipy negative-Nancies, either – they’ll tell their mommies on them.
Per the report, the Army intends not just to monitor platforms for “negative sentiment”, but also to pinpoint the location of posters.
Via the Intercept:
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 document mentions the use of “geo-fenced” data as well, a controversial practice wherein an investigator draws a shape on a digital map to focus their surveillance of a specific area.
And don’t even think about turning them into a green cartoon frog, or a badly-drawn clown, or anything.
According to the Intercept, the PSB wants to search not just mainstream social media platforms, but also anonymous and semi-anonymous discussion boards like 4chan and Reddit, as well as the chat platforms Discord and Telegram.
Breitbart
Looks like Meme War 2024 is about to get real hot.