Anti-Terror Efforts More Concerned With Enriching Contractors

New Report Suggests Anti-Terror Efforts More Concerned With Enriching Contractors Than Thwarting Terrorism

A new AP report claims that a counter-propaganda program, that was supposedly aimed at thwarting ISIS/terrorism over social media, is shrouded in cronyism, skewed data, and alarming incompetence.

The program is known as the WebOps program and it was launched a number of years ago by a collective of civilian contractors and military officers who were tasked to the information operations division in Florida, where the U.S. Central Command headquarters are located.

The report shows, according to internal documents and interviews conducted with a number of people who are knowledgeable about the program etc, that the WebOps program appears to have been designed more for the objective of lining the pockets of military contractors, rather than it is concerned about genuinely trying to deter or crack-down on terrorism.

The program involves a number of analysts, (supposed to be) capable of speaking Arabic, who are tasked with looking on a variety of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others, for people who might be posting content that suggests they'd be vulnerable to one day joining these terror groups. The analysts use fake identities in order to contact those who might be potential targets/posing cause for worry.

Interviews from those who were knowledgeable about the program, indicate that a number of the analysts were sorely lacking in their Arabic-language speaking abilities and that they didn't have much experience with counter-propaganda. Therefore, they suggest that those analysts were no match for the online recruiters for these terror groups. In one specific example, it's reported that an analyst actually mixed up the words for “authority” and “salad”.

There are also allegations of manipulated data by analysts, in order to make it appear like they were having success with the program.

Information in the report also argues that the military contracting companies, which are tasked with carrying out the program, have dodged their responsibility to implement any oversight or thorough assessment of the actual data that is being collected.

Last year, just one of the government's “counter-propaganda contracts” was going for around $500 million.

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