So you're comfortable with calling the rapid spread via new media of ideas, images, movies, plans, slogans, news, and quotations "viral", but when someone uses the related word "contagion" in the same context you're all of a sudden clutching your pearls?

Because the new media theories and the math that explains them all come from epidemiology. That's where this language comes from. Sorry. Epidemiological terminology, dude. Don't hide under the bed because somebody said viral, contagion, meme, or antibody.

It doesn't surprise me that the military studies the effects of social movements, both to hinder them for friendly regimes and help them for enemy governments. That's part of defense.

The one concerning nugget is domestic spying. But you mash all these hysterical paranoid ravings in with that nugget and you end up with a very confused blog post.

Would be very interested to learn more about the UW departments receiving DoD grants.

Isn’t this where Dr. Zola started when he developed Hydra’s data-mining algorithm to identify individuals who might become future threats to Hydra's plans?

When do the Helicarriers launch

@2, I had similar curiosity - did a quick search of the UW website and could find no leads. A journalist could probably contact the UW Office of Research to inquire.
UW Office of Research
Gerberding Hall G80
Box 351202
Seattle, WA 98195-1202
(206) 616-0804 tel
(206) 685-9210 fax
research@uw.edu

Read "Enemies: A History of the FBI" by Tim Weiner. This pales in comparison with what Hoover's FBI did w/r/t monitoring suspected Communists throughout most of the 20th century.

I'm interested to know if The Guardian got their information from Snowden.

You know the cops in NY were able to arrest scores of people, based on their loudmouth bragging of crimes they posted about on Facebook.

https://news.vice.com/article/the-kids-a…

So if police can monitor and find that all sorts of crimes are being committed, then it makes sense for the feds will monitor for similar crimes against the state.

To be fair and thoughtful (...I know. Nothing like me, is it?) I can see a legitimate need for DoD to study this, especially with respect to what it takes to destabilize other governments. It would have been a whole lot cheaper to destabilize Iraq with a Twitter war than with the whole fucking U.S. defense establishment. I mean, if that was your goal, which it seems like it was. (Excuse me while I go off and mutter about stupid, fucking Bush and Cheney and the rest of their brainless trust... Brutal dictator Saddam was sitting on a long-simmering sectarian volcano in a highly volcanic region. We uncorked that volcano and now it can't be stopped.)

Call it psy-ops or whatever, but I think it's important for DoD to understand how to read, and perhaps influence, public sentiment in countries that end up in our cross-hairs. I don't want to ever again see us do something as stupid as fucking up Iraq was.

Meanwhile, if they're studying this with an eye to suppression of anything happening in the U.S., someone should remind them that they're not supposed to be fucking around on U.S. soil. That's the FBI's job.

Translation: Thoughtcrimes

Btw it is Unconstitutional to spy on Americans in America or (US-Canada Data Treaty and Canadian Supreme Court) Canadians in Canada, US, or EU.

Don't blame me if you sign a treaty you don't understand.

There are real problems with this kind of surveillance.

In general, it just doesn't work. Look at the Secret Service trying to find a sarcasm detector to filter out jokes from threats. How many false leads do agents track down every day while anyone clever enough to form an actual plan knows mentioning it on Facebook is a bad idea?

It is really expensive. The NSA is now collecting data on every American and warehousing it in data centers. We are paying billions of dollars to collect and store this data, but it is almost impossible to search. It's hard enough to get data out after the fact but sifting through the real time feed is ridiculous. Which doesn't mean they won't spend additional billions trying.

The same people who applaud us putting a 40 billion dollar missile defense system which does not and will never work probably like spending as much or more on this data collection because we have to do something, right? Defense contractors can only get paid for doing absolutely nothing for a while. Eventually they have to have at least something impressive to walk the joint chiefs through.

And of course it is unconstitutional, but as long as they don't track gun sales I guess everything is hunky dory on that front.

@5 - I find it reassuring that our government is planning to ensure the status quo of corporate control and maintain order by neutralizing popular movements before they are able to be successful.

@1 - "The one concerning nugget is domestic spying." Wow, you really don't know your history, do you. Domestic spying ain't the half of it! That has been going on since the early days. They actively assassinated people, esp. blacks, (MLK, MalcolmX, B.Panthers, etc.) and like to keep interesting people locked up in jail forever (Mumia, Peltier, etc.)

If you were bothering them enough, they'd probably burn your house down, like they did to an AIDS activist I once knew.

Also:
"viral" simply means 'self-replicating', it's not specifically pathogenic.
"contagion" means very specifically "spread of disease".

The word is not chosen carelessly. Popular movements are considered 'diseases' of the social body (by them), or 'weaponizeable' against popularist leaders in other countries. While corporate malfeasance and economic warfare is considered the status quo. Can't let human ethics get in the way of greed, now can we?

Stories like this make it hard to ignore the analysis of Chris Hedges:

On May 15th, 2013:

Everyone knows -- within the administration, within the national security council -- the effects of climate change, the instability that that will cause, the economic deterioration which is irreversible. And they want the mechanisms by which they can criminalize any form of dissent, and that's finally what this is about.

On November 16th, 2013:

Now, this was quite a significant dump, because it illustrated two or three very chilling things about the security and surveillance state, first of all that there was no division between corporate spying and government spying. It was seamless, including the same people going back and forth. It was from that dump that we realized the extent to which the Occupy movement was being spied upon and infiltrated and monitored and followed. And we also found from those email exchanges that there was a concerted attempt on the part of security officials, both inside the government and within the private security contracting agency, to link, falsely, nonviolent dissident groups with terrorist groups so that they could apply terrorism laws against these groups.

On June 9th, 2014:

Lesson No. 1. A nonviolent movement that disrupts the machinery of state and speaks a truth a state hopes to suppress has the force to terrify authority and create deep fissures within the power structure. The ruling elites in China, we now know from leaked internal documents and the work of a handful of historians, believed the protests had the potential to dislodge them from power. Monolithic power, as we saw in China, is often a mirage. Some of the internal documents that exposed the fears and deep divisions within the ruling elite have been collected by the Princeton University Library.

@9 - It would have been a whole lot cheaper to destabilize Iraq with a Twitter war than with the whole fucking U.S. defense establishment. I mean, if that was your goal, which it seems like it was.

Yeah, because that's what foreign governments should be doing, destabilizing other countries. So if, say, Brazil didn't like the political scene in D.C, they are ok to go about destabilizing the USA via Twitter or whatever?
Or does that just apply to "good" countries who have pure, innocent, and exclusively democratic goals, like us. Because those are the only goals we ever have. Ever.

(And no, merely destabilizing Iraq was definitely not the only goal. Nor was simply removing Saddam.)

"Meanwhile, if they're studying this with an eye to suppression of anything happening in the U.S., someone should remind them that they're not supposed to be fucking around on U.S. soil. That's the FBI's job."

Bwaa!-ha-ha-ha-haaa! Fuck, you are a funny funny man. :D "Someone should remind them", ha! you're killin' me, man, you're killin' me... if they're studying this with an eye to suppression of anything [...] in the U.S. STOP! God Stop!! My sides! They hurt! "IF.." HAHAHAHAAAAAOhgod! you are too much! too fuckin' much!

@1 is quite correct. The contagion theory of communication has been around for many years, at least since Mark Granovetter's seminal 1973 paper "The Strength of Weak Ties". Try Googling "contagion theory of communication" and you will turn up tens of thousands of scholarly articles. The DoD is just following established sociological language here.

Governments the world over have a long history of keeping tabs on communists, fascists, and any other group with revolutionary aims. Don't see anything new or interesting here.

@2 - UW receives about $50M a year in DoD grants.

we saw Russia take Crimea with a fresh approach, and foment separatist action skilfully. this management of crowds seems effective. how could we not study this?

the Arab Spring has turned out to suck bad, and even when it seemed cool it was surprising the heck out of us

greater and greater portions of the global pop. live in cities where it's tough to fight neatly

Why don't they just pass out condoms. They work for all the other contagions.

@15 Thank you, thank you! I'll be here all week! Leave your tips at the bar.

We have a huge defense establishment, with an even huger budget. In peacetime, that gives them way too many toys and ideas to play with. What's the reason we don't reduce our military budget? Pork, patronage, politics and paranoia.

Having lived through weekly "duck and cover" nuclear armageddon drills at school, I'm more than a little cynical about these kind of things, but I'd like to hope there was at least some military purpose for this that didn't involve enslaving all of us.