DHS Had Plans of Slapping Social Media Users With Social Credit Style “Risk Scores”
Jose Nino
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Recently released documents revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) signed a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to set up a project, titled “Night Fury,” with the aim of analyzing and adding “risk scores” to social media accounts.
The Brennan Center for Justice obtained these documents via public records request, and Motherboard was the first organization to cover these documents. Project Night Fury had the goal of using automation to detect and review social media accounts for ties to disinformation campaigns, illegal opioid distribution, and terrorism.
Per a DHS document, “The Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or ‘Risk Score,’ associated with the identified accounts.”
Project Night Fury also had plans of involving the Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in this program to provide “cross-mission operational context,” per one of the documents.
Experts cautioned the DHS about the inherent difficulties and biases that come with automated judgment for these subjects, alluding to how characteristics like being “pro-terrorist” have no solid definition.
Back in 2019, DHS ended Project Night Fury.
Although Night Fury’s was mostly concentrated on “counter-terrorism, illegal opioid supply chain, transnational crime, and understanding/characterizing/identifying the spread of disinformation by foreign entities,” the documents revealed that UAB’s work was meant to “scale to other DHS domains” and “build next generation capabilities.”
One of the dangers of not checking the size of government expansion is that there will be more instances of government abuse and intrusions into people’s daily lives. For that reason, America First nationalists must due everything to push for the defunding and eventual
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