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Friday, October 31, 2014

Department of Defense Tracking Smart Phones?

Top Three are Army
Fort Hood 33%
Fort Campbell 35%
Fort Bragg 11%

The DOD used DARPA for tracking social media sites. Ok, and what exactly was accomplished by all of this?
This Is The Suicide Info Whisper Gave To The Department Of Defense
Forbes
Kashmire Hill
Forbes Staff
October 30, 2014
What Whisper sent to a Department of Defense researcher, via Whisper.

Last month, the Guardian did a hard-hitting piece on Whisper, reporting that the start-up that offered users the cover of anonymity to voice their deepest secrets was actually tracking interesting users, storing user data and making it searchable for editorial and research use by outside organizations (like the Guardian), and “sharing information with the US Department of Defense gleaned from smartphones it knows are used from military bases.” Regarding one sex-crazed lobbyist using the app from D.C., an unnamed member of the Whisper team told Guardian reporters that “he’s a guy that we’ll track for the rest of his life and he’ll have no idea we’ll be watching him.”

Whisper has fought back hard against the damaging report — which led to terrible press and an angry letter from a senator – saying the Guardian exaggerated the scrutiny it put its users under, was wrong about its cavalierly digging up location information on users who hadn’t volunteered it, and had talked to an employee whose statements “[did] not reflect our values and what we stand for.”

What I wanted to know was what exactly Whisper was handing over to the Pentagon. The Guardian described it thusly: “The company is cooperating with the US Department of Defense, sharing information with researchers investigating the frequency of mentions of suicide or self-harm from smartphones that Whisper knows are being used from US military bases.” I reached out to both Whisper and to the DoD to find out the exact nature of the information being handed over, and found out it was less alarming — and less useful — that it initially seemed.

At first the Pentagon had no idea what I was talking about. Whisper CEO Michael Heyward had said Whisper was working with the Department of Defense’s Suicide Prevention Office but Defense Department spokesperson James Brindle said that wasn’t the case. “The Defense Suicide Prevention Office is unaware of the use of Whisper as a suicide prevention tool for the Department of Defense,” said Brindle.
read more here

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