"The
goal that IARPA has is to eventually transition this to the
intelligence community, and use it for something like the National
Intelligence Estimates," Jenn Carter, who works on the project, told the BBC last year. National Intelligence Estimates are US government intelligence reports on national security issues that predict future events.
One so-called success story of the new Open Source Indicators Program, as reported in The Wall Street Journal on September 10th by Rachel King, involves a team of university academics and representatives from the private sector which "forecasted several protests in Brazil" for the South American nation's independence day. The same team, writes King, also successfully forecasted protests in Paraguay after the 2012 coup against President Fernando Lugo.
Albro was dubious of the program's revelations on the Brazil protests,
calling it a "drinking the kool-aid moment," where the project's
supporters will use this alleged success to reinforce their beliefs
about the project's viability.
David
Price, a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Justice
at Saint Martin's University shares a similar sentiment. "I am extremely
skeptical that these sort of planes of prediction will work out the way
they want them to," he said. "However, I understand why those in power
who want to know what's going on in the world, and want to manipulate
it, are so interested in this."
The
US intelligence community has come under fire over the last dozen years
for failures to predict major events, from 9/11 and the Iraq War to the
Arab Spring. One notable critique emerged in a February 2011 Senate
hearing, when Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that, in regards to the upheaval in Egypt,
"she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had
ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts
on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers
of the protests against the Mubarak government."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
2
