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Good one via The Guardian.  Brushes on some of the topics discussed on this board, and provides one of the most plausible explanations for the scope of intelligence agency internal population surveillance, 'fusion center' construction, etc:

  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown

"Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised"

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A few years back there was rioting in London - the rioters weapon of choice was the Blackberry - apparently its messages could be sent anonymously. The police were always one step behind - the riots were spontaneous in nature, but faciltated by anonymous comms.
  The British response to the likelihood of impending civil unrest is somewhat more old school than the Minerva Research Initiative - the Mayor of London has just invested in the good old, tried and tested water cannon (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/11/boris-johnson-water-cannon-blast-theresa-may).

   In my view, instead of the US Minerva project spending millions on trying to understand the behavioural dynamics of civil unrest via mass surveillance/putting social scientists on the payroll, they might be better advised to try and understand the underlying social, economic and cultural exclusion that forms the backdrop to civil unrest. I'm sure there would be plenty of Marxist academic sociologists  up and down the land who could give them the basics on that one  ;D
But then thats the real issue here isn't it ? - TPTB have no desire whatsoever to address economic inequality, nor the inequality in life chances for citizens of the "free" world. TPTB wish to preserve the existing inequality against those that would question and oppose it - and not just within its own borders neither, but within the borders of any nation (read "satellite") that the US deems to be of strategic importance to its own interests !!


Its stuff like this that helps remind me why I quit Facebook  8)
      
          

The instant messaging flashmob response to that should be to re constitute the mob at a slightly varying location every minute or so, leading the water cannons in a circle.  Or to the pre designated point where they sink into mud, are attacked by massive quantities of fire ants, or various other entertaining possibilities.

I guess, though, water cannon would be useful in protecting fixed sites like national monuments from being vandalized. 

Government can prepare all they want.  But they will not have enough resources to enforce civil order if many cities start mass protesting at the same time.

Katrina disaster is a good example of what will happen if things go bad enough.

It's called a social "contagion" so that its extermination may be justified.

Call Kim Dotkom and his friends because Pentagon is in danger zone!

Not a viable method in a "democratic" country where people can figure things out easily thank to internet.

I think Kim love when pentagon in "danger zone". He is unknown person for me but he have some powers in the hacker's part of the internet.

I'm counting on you to be right, but I may be disappointed.  A large block of the US population is comprised of folks who aren't paying much attention.

Being indifferent is more likely. Since so many are still getting welfare check from the government.

Glad I never bothered with facebook, the revolution will not be tweeted (or liked). I think the internet is good for organising people but you'll always have some nosey spook looking over your shoulder.

Fema and millions of hollow point bullets disagree.

Kim dot com should be a god. He's the only big name sticking up for freedom on the internet and one of the only people willing to use a mass amount of money to kick the Americans in the nuts. I pray he wins

This is much more troubling
http://torrentfreak.com/court-hands-google-worldwide-site-blocking-injunction-140618/

Power to the peeeeooplllllle, just goes to show how shit scared the governments are of their native populations.

Unfortunately.
When your job is to evaluate possible threats, everything looks like a threat.
And given that the Pentagon has to deal with our so-called leaders in ways and on levels that evade public scrutiny, perchance they have a different perception of the odds that our so-called democracy is being run by people who are really going  to screw the pooch.
Put it another way, given all of the high crimes and misdemeanors that have been committed by high public officials of recent memory, they may be getting ready for the blowback that will surely come IF we don't make some real changes ASAP. The people who give them their orders expect them to keep that from happening, whatever it takes.

These idiots think there will be social unrest over CLIMATE CHANGE?  Oh, SURE!  It couldn't possibly be the NSA, ObamaCare, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, immigration crisis on the border, our abandonment of Ukraine and Iraq, the Obama admin exchanging 5 top Taliban for a deserter, the ongoing depression, or the collapse of the currency  ...

I duno man. Eventually climate change will be the most important factor in geo-politics. If you think we fight like cats and dogs over oil, wait until the clean water dries up. This is already the case in some parts of the world.
None of the things you mentioned will be talked about in twenty years. In a century they will only be known to a few historians. But our hot planet will be known to every human and it will be a daily part of life.
Global warming is the greatest threat to our species since the pleistocene. And the scary part is that there is no reason to believe it will stop getting warmer until we, and maybe all life, is gone. This is something the pentagon understands.

None of this surprises...the US has been using "think tanks" and analysts over decades to look at future trends/threats. Today it's climate effects such as food and water shortages, immigration from mass population movements. I guess no-one can plan for 100 years ahead but a few decades - probably. The oil grab worldwide, esp. fracking, seems to me a hunkering down by Western countries to secure this "Western" future. Sod the climate, surely analysts who advise those in power know this is down the tubes.
And can one imagine anything like what's happening in the Middle East getting to Europe or the US? Everything will be done to stop this.

We'll get there in time. Just like when we had those 14.4K Hayes modems and 64-kbps ISDN seemed like science fiction. Now I have 120 MBPS optic fiber at work, 6 MBps at home and fiber for home seems more affordable every day.

So the government's stooges are charged with identifying which Americans might instigate civil disobedience and which Americans might join in civil disobedience.  Wont take long for this devolve into an apparatus for jihad on one's political enemies.
America saw this once before . . . in a place called Salem.

Nothing forestalls violence like the belief you are already defeated. If they can convince enough people of their superiority, people will not chance the effort. Of course they cannot control the US, maybe a few cities, perhaps they can sabotage infrastructure or disperse chemical and biological weapons, but once you start mass killing the population, you have already lost the war.
I see no study for a peaceful withdraw of acceptance or refusal to obey the laws. For the refusal to use FED notes or bank transactions. To withdraw wealth from points the government can control access. They only understand violence and thus, can only imagine a violent start and finish. 
The power of the People is acceptance of the State in all its' guises. Once this is withdrawn, the State withers and dies. 

In the long term, everyone dies. The government can suppress the population for pretty long before dying.

Remember that they are just gaming this out. That is what they do, identify threats and discuss options. It would be profoundly negligent of the pentagon to ignore humanities greatest threat. 

This is actually very important thing to consider.

I remember when there was a very interesting program to spray for 'the light brown apple moth' around the Bay Area some years ago.  The 'problem' was dubious, the parties to contracted to perform the operation were interesting, and the contents of the spray were more interesting yet.  Kind of a series of time release capsules engineered at nearly a nano scale.  Between these things, I hypothesized that it was an experiment that was ready to be performed in a populated urban area.  At the same time I argued to my friends that it the authorities would be remiss in not performing such experiments.  There are a wide variety of situations under which such technology would be a useful component of an arsenal.  Some good and some bad.

All of this technology has the potential to be used for good and for bad things.  The problem is that NOBODY has a crystal ball.  Not the masses nor the leaderships who are commissioning the programs.

Ignoring the potential for mis-use of this technology is completely negligent.  It is pretty close to a certainty that the technology will be attempted to be mis-used at some point in the future.  For this reason it is imperative that coincident with development means of balancing out the new-found powers are also developed.

I, for one, have no real problem with the development of technologies of these types.  It's going to happen.  Period.  Where I have a GIANT problem is in keeping them secret and spurring development along only the offensive track and not the defensive.  The two (secrecy and development focus) are highly interrelated and extremely worrisome.

There are some arguments for keeping everything secret but they are somewhat lame in many cases.  One is that our 'enemies' might be given a jump on development of their own efforts along similar lines.  I hold that this is weak because if they do learn from us, their implementations will be more well understood by us.

Another argument that is especially relevant to the domestic surveillance is that it will tip off the targets and they will change there ways.  This is weak for a variety of reasons.  One is that it is a transient benefit.  Those of us who've been paying attention and understood the technology already more-or-less knew about these programs before Snowden, and a Snowden was likely to come along at some point anyway.  The long and the short of it is that most 'enemies' who are a genuine threat would not gain much by the blanket (and leaky) secrecy and have already made the necessary adjustments.  Indeed, it is possible to use the false sense of secrecy against the very systems that are operating under the assumption that the secrecy exists.

There is very little to be gained by excessive secrecy and a huge amount to be lost (from the perspective of those of us who don't want to see abuses of the systems.)  As Senator Wyden says, if we don't make some changes in terms of how we do domestic surveillance, we will regret it within our lifetimes.  I strongly suspect that he is right about this both generally and in his timeframe.

While nobody knows for sure how some of these technologies will be used in a future which is not fully know, the dangers of abuse are obvious enough that it is reasonable to be suspicious of the motives of those at the top of the food-chain especially when they wrap everything in secrecy and outright lies.  They simply do not want any checks and balances and thus impediments to further development and utilization of these dangerous technologies.  It is perfectly rational to question why.

I just noticed another article which pivot's off of the OP Guardian one.  Also worth a read for those interested in such things.

  http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/24528-us-funds-terror-studies-to-dissect-and-neutralize-social-movements

I also just looked up 'minerva' which I thought I remembered to have been some goddess of wisdom.  From Wikipedia:


and:


Both are roughly associated with the Greek goddess Athena who was similar except without the focus on warfare and weapons.  Presumably as the Romans were more focused on outright empire building the association between warfare, economics, and 'wisdom' became more focal.

In the here and now, it seems unlikely that those who are in the drivers seat of the 'Project Minerva' were victims of chance in their choice of project names.

It is also unsurprising in a different way that the enemy which is most heavily focused upon is that which is based within the national population.  This is the most significant threat to the power structures of most large and powerful nations, and has been a key element in the downfall of most of them.

2008 was a pivotal year for the U.S.  I believe that a lot of policy makers and others in positions of power who were fairly comfortable were jarred out of their complacency by the financial near-miss.  Because I've been a long term observer and participant in the global internet and worked in the sector, I sensed the shift most significantly there.  Certain more far thinking elements have dabbled in leveraging the global interternet's capabilities to support (or even to form the medium for) internal and global conflict but it these people were more peripheral before the recognition of the brittleness of our current economic systems was more broadly appreciated.

Do they have a timeline on when mass civil breakdown will occur?

How on earth would anyone here know that?  We can entertain ourselves by contemplating it however.

No:  It could be fairly spontaneous and triggered by an unpredictable event.

Yes:  It could be triggered deliberately at an opportune time.  It's usually a lot 'smarter' to do a controlled demolition if a collapse is assured.

Maybe/depends:  It could be engineered in some places, or caught early and guided as desirable in some places, and the 'contagion' could be controlled and localized.  In other areas not so much.

In all cases, as someone above said, it actually does make a lot of sense to understand the phenomenon as well as possible, and that would apply whether one's aims and goals are nefarious or not.

In this case I suspect that the study and analysis is so expansive that it would include a variety of important actors who have differing postures and dispositions.  Many of those working in academia, for instance, may have no clue about how the results of their analysis might end up being employed.  Of course a nice big fat grant goes some distance toward being able to ignore that aspect of things and focus on the more interesting hard science and totally fascinating and high quality data being fed into the models which are being constructed.