Monitoring social media for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats and identifying “negative sentiment” regarding its wards

not just to detect online “threats,” but also pinpoint their exact location by combining various surveillance techniques and data sources.

The document cites access to Twitter’s “firehose,” which would grant the Army the ability to search public tweets and Twitter users without restriction, as well as analysis of 4Chan, Reddit, YouTube, and Vkontakte, a Facebook knockoff popular in Russia. Internet chat platforms like Discord and Telegram will also be scoured

The contract says the Army would use “misattribution”: deceiving others about who is actually behind the keyboard. The document says the Army would accomplish this through falsifying web browser information and by relaying Army internet traffic through servers located in foreign cities, obscuring its stateside origin.

Ooops, the Army also does not want to advertise its interest in broad data collection. The redacted copy of the contract document, while public, is marked as CUI, for “Controlled Unclassified Information,” and FEDCON, meant for federal employees and contractors only.