U.S. troops may soon find themselves accused of “extremism” with just a few keystrokes on social media.
Internal Defense Department documents reviewed by The Intercept spotlight plans by top brass to root out potential threats with online surveillance.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tasked Bishop Garrison, a senior advisor, with moving the program forward, the documents reveal.
“The Department of Defense is exploring a means of implementing social media screening in conjunction with background investigations,” a spokesperson for the House Armed Services Committee said in a statement following the piece’s publication on Monday. ” We anticipate that any social media screening would be intended only as an additional means of vetting cleared individuals or those seeking to obtain a security clearance, not as a tool for ongoing surveillance of all men and women in uniform.”
News of the documents follows reporting on the Pentagon’s Countering Extremism Working Group, which aims to incorporate “machine learning and natural language processing into social media screening platforms.”
The Intercept’s reporting on the group also covered its “list of potential consultants that included anti-Muslim and Christian conservative groups.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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