Sean Adl-Tabatabai – Newly leaked DHS documents reveal a plan to assign social credit scores to all 331 million Americans and severely limit the freedom of ‘non-compliant’ citizens who are placed on a government blacklist.

The newly disclosed documents have revealed that Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to develop a project, dubbed “Night Fury,” designed to analyze and assign “risk scores” to all social media accounts.

The Brennan Center for Justice obtained these documents through a public records request. Project Night Fury aims at utilizing AI to detect and evaluate social media accounts for connections to so-called ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech.’

The DHS document stated, “The Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or ‘Risk Score,’ associated with the identified accounts.”

Reclaimthenet.org reports: Project Night Fury had also planned on incorporating involvement from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to provide “cross-mission operational context,” according to one of the documents.

Experts had warned DHS about the inherent difficulties and biases involved in automated judgment for these matters, citing that characteristics like being “pro-terrorist” have no concrete definition.

Notably, DHS terminated Project Night Fury in 2019. However, it underscores the agency’s continued interest in social media as a resource for analysis. This comes in the wake of earlier reports of CBP utilizing an AI-powered tool, Babel X, for analyzing travelers’ social media at US borders.

While Night Fury’s focus was initially on “counter-terrorism, illegal opioid supply chain, transnational crime, and understanding/ characterizing/ identifying the spread of disinformation by foreign entities,” the documents indicate that UAB’s work was intended to “scale to other DHS domains” and “build next generation capabilities.”

SF Source The People’s Voice Jun 2023