The Military Strategy You've Never Heard Of Being Used To Crush Dissent

Why the regime is calling you a "terrorist" or "insurgent" and the little known Iraq war playbook being used to target you.

In Minnesota and elsewhere, we have seen the rapid expansion of regime mass surveillance directed at American citizens engaged in First Amendment-protected activities. In my last post, the first in this series, I detailed the tools and techniques being deployed. These include the collection of personal data from social media platforms and third party data brokers, but also cell phone forensics and collection of biometric data. If you haven’t already, do go and read that post to understand what we are up against. This is only the beginning of the capabilities that will be deployed against us. It will get worse.

This deployment of mass surveillance capabilities is not without a strategy. That strategy is the focus of today’s post. I have studied the U.S. military’s adoption of computing and information technologies all the way back to World War II and up to the present. When I started reading reports about the uses of surveillance technologies in Minnesota and around the country, I immediately recognized the playbook: “identity operations” in support of “individualized warfare.” In this post, we’ll dig into what that entails.

Defining Identity Operations

A 2015 research report [PDF] by Glenn J. Voelz for the Strategic Studies Institute at the Army War College provides the most comprehensive account of the central role of “identity operations” in the emergence of “individualized warfare” during U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Identity operations use identity information and personal attributes to positively identify individuals within a population. The goal is to resolve who is who so that military forces can screen and attribute actions to specific individuals. The intended effect is to distinguish specific persons from the broader populace, thereby denying anonymity to adversaries and, ultimately, enabling identity-based targeting.

This approach was developed in response to a central challenge faced by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. That challenge was to distinguish who is the enemy when the enemy does not wear a uniform and looks like every other member of the population. The military got the inspiration it needed to solve the problem by taking note of the increasing use of big data and personal profiling in the private sector for recommendation engines and microtargeted advertising.

In his 2015 report, Voelz identified three pillars to this new approach to warfare against nonstate enemies: individualization, identity, and information.

Individualization involves “the systematic disaggregation of threats down to the lowest possible level, often the individual combatant. In this mode of warfare, the targeting of ‘high-value individuals’ became a paramount national security concern.”

Identity operations were required “to identify and discriminate among” individuals.

“As the targeting process became personalized, new kinds of information and methods were required which included biographic, biometric, and forensics data, and the use of network analysis for linking these identities to places, activities, and other actors. Identity attributes became the new technical signature of battlefield targeting and the first line of defense in the ‘watch listing’ approach to homeland security.”

Information gathered during identity operations “required new tools and methods for collecting, processing, and communicating identity information across the entire national security apparatus. The need to identify, screen, and target these threats at home and abroad made information management and data analysis the most important weapons.”

The Conduct of Identity Operations

Identity operations are conducted using precisely the tools and techniques being deployed in Minnesota and across the United States against immigrants and activists alike. Those core elements include:

• Biometrics: Uses physical and behavioral characteristics (e.g., fingerprints, iris scans, DNA) to fix identity—often described as effectively “putting a uniform on the enemy.”

• Forensics (including so-called “expeditionary forensics”): Material and digital forensics used in the field by soldiers to link individuals to events, devices, or actions.

• Social Network Analysis (SNA): Maps relationships to help connect individuals to networks and support targeting against high-value individuals. Analysis is fueled by biometrics, forensics, and collection of online data.

• Data fusion: Integrates biometric/forensic data with other intelligence sources to resolve identities and strengthen confidence in matches. Analysis and fusion are where tools like Palantir come into play.

The methods of collecting identity information should sound familiar considering what we have seen in Minnesota and elsewhere. The typical workflow goes something like this:

1. Collection in the field: During patrols, checkpoints, and detainee handling, collect biographic, biometric, and contextual “who/where/with whom” indicators for screening and verification.

2. Correlation & identity resolution: Link attributes to a unique individual, reconcile duplicates and aliases, and connect identity to activities and networks.

3. Fusion into Identity Intelligence: Produce usable identity intelligence products from the fused set of identity attributes.

4. Dissemination & operational use: Share identity data across organizations/systems to support screening and targeting.

Exactly these methods have been used against protestors, who have had their personally identifiable information like license plates scanned and stored by ICE, their biometric information taken, and who have been individually targeted as a result.

Individual targeting of so-called “high-value targets” is the ultimate goal of identity operations. This targeting can be informational (e.g. deception, influence) or kinetic (e.g. capture, kill). In my next post, I will discuss the various methods of individualized, sometimes even “personalized” targeting that have already been used and that have been contemplated in the literature on individualized warfare.

War is Not a Metaphor

Before we dive into the details of individualized, personalized targeting, it is vital that we understand that the strategy emerging in Minnesota is not just like that employed during the “war on terror.” It is exactly that same strategy. The regime sees Americans who resist as terrorists and insurgents and intends to use the same strategy against them that the U.S. military used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The regime and its supporters increasingly frame resistance to their tyranny as “terrorism” or “insurgency.” Several weeks ago, a special forces-style “assessment” was circulating to great fanfare among the MAGA base online. It framed the peaceful protests in Minnesota as an insurgency to justify the use of military force.

But this self-proclaimed former Green Beret was merely echoing the President and his advisors’ own rhetoric. Trump has called the protestors in Minnesota “traitors” and “insurrectionists.” Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem called activists murdered by ICE “domestic terrorists.” Advisor/shadow president Stephen Miller has insisted on multiple occasions that protests in Minnesota constitute an “insurgency.”

Tellingly, in an interview with right-wing propaganda outlet, Real America’s Voice, Miller stated that, “More arrests of insurrectionists are being made every day. And each of those arrests provides an opportunity to learn more about the network from a law enforcement and national security standpoint.”

This is a clear, concise description of identity operations. He is describing collection in the field for the purposes of identity resolution and correlation, fusing the data to map the networks of activists. He also hints, at the end of the quote, at why this is now possible inside the United States and against American citizens.

These capabilities exist because of the blurring of the line between law enforcement and military during the “war on terror,” which resulted in the increasing militarization of policing. But that militarization does not just take the form of surplus military vehicles and other equipment making its way into the hands of small town police forces. As Voelz explained,

“On the domestic front, the rise of iWar [individualized warfare] has been most evident in the emergence of the ‘watch listing’ phenomena and identity-based screening programs that have become the central feature of post-9/11 homeland security strategy. Over the last decade, the identities of millions of individuals have been added to such watch lists, augmented with detailed biographic information, biometric profiles, operational histories, and extended networks of associations and contacts. These databases have become the informational basis of an identity-based screening program designed to spotlight individual threats and screen against likely risks to transportation networks, critical infrastructure, and domestic security.”

This is exactly what an ICE agent in Maine meant when, after taking pictures of a legal observer and her vehicle, he told her, “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

Conclusion

The rapidly expanding mass surveillance and data collection deployed against American citizens, particularly activists and immigrants, is driven by a recognized military strategy termed “identity operations” in support of “individualized warfare.” This approach, developed during U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, aims to positively identify individuals, deny anonymity and enable targeting of individuals on a massive scale.

The core of this strategy relies on the systematic collection and fusion of biographic, biometric, and forensics data, often described through the pillars of individualization, identity, and information. Saying that this is a form of warfare is not a metaphor but the direct application of “war on terror” tactics domestically, made possible by the increasing militarization of policing and the rise of the “watch listing” phenomenon as a central feature of post-9/11 homeland security. The Trump regime not only calls American resistors “insurgents” and “terrorists,” but it is utilizing the very tools and tactics developed to target insurgents and terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan against Americans.

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In the next post, we will look more deeply at what individualized and personalized targeting has entailed in practice in recent conflicts, as well as possibilities for future use in both the informational and physical domains.

In the meantime, please take a moment to fill out the following survey to help me decide which short course to create first to help you all better prepare for where we are headed.

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Resistance School Short Courses

I am planning to offer a series of short courses focused on digital security and open source intelligence topics that will be of benefit to those of us engaged in resistance activities. Here are the three I ideas I have to start:

• Encrypted Organizing: Secure Communications & Data in an Age of Mass Surveillance

• Dox Defense 101: Clean Up Your Online Footprint to Defend Against Doxxing & Online Harassment

• Person Of Interest Research: Investigate the Online Footprint of Digital Bad Actors