Theodore John Kaczynski, who later became known as Unabomber, was given the code name "Lawful". Among other purposes, Murray's experiments were focused on measuring people's reaction under extreme stress. Assaults to their egos, cherished ideas and beliefs were the vehicle used to cause high levels of stress and distress to Murray's unwitting guinea pigs.
These experiments were conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962.[77] and were part of the CIA-sponsored MKUltra experiments. Kaczynski participated along with 21 other undergraduate students in Murray's experiments, which have been described as "disturbing" and "ethically indefensible."[77][78]
Kathryn Bigelow's Osama bin Laden revenge-porn flick Zero Dark Thirtywas the biggest publicity coup for the CIA this century outside of the actual killing of Osama bin Laden. But the extent to which the CIA shaped the film has remained unclear. Now, a memo obtained by Gawker shows that the CIA actively, and apparently successfully, pressured Mark Boal to remove scenes that made them look bad from the Zero Dark Thirty script.
Former CIA director George Tenet says,
We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered ... In-Q-Tel. ... While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology ...
Noel Sharkey is a multi-disciplinarian with a career spanning psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, engineering and robotics. He holds a PhD in psychology/cognitive science and has an honorary science doctorate DSc. He is a chartered electrical engineer and a chartered information technology professional. Noel holds fellowships at the Institution of Engineering and Information Technology, the Royal Institute of Navigation, the British Computer Society and the Royal Society of Arts. He is a member of the Experimental Psychology Society and also Equity, the actors union. Noel is best known to the public for his frequent appearances in the media as a robot expert. His current research passion is on the ethics of robot applications including care, policing, military, crime, sex, transport and medicine.
Google’s big principled stance against surveillance is honorable — or it would be, if the company wasn’t so deeply involved in the very thing that it claims to be against.
what few people realize is that Google has also been using its wares to enhance and enrich the surveillance operations of the biggest and most powerful intelligence and DoD agencies in the world: NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA and NGA — the whole alphabet soup.
The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years..
We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.
We may think of ourselves as rational actors, in conscious control of our choices, but most of what we do is reflexive. Our behavior is determined by our subliminal reactions to the influence of other people, particularly those in the various peer groups we belong to.
The CIA saw LSD as a potential “truth serum," according to FOIA documents obtained by Jacobsen, but it turned out to be an active metaphor for Cold War paranoia.
At a secret black site in the years after the end of WWII, CIA and US intelligence operatives tested LSD and other interrogation techniques on captured Soviet spies—all with the help of former Nazi doctors. An excerpt from Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip, published this week.
reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s.
In 1996, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist GARY WEBB (1955–2004) wrote a shocking series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News exposing the CIA’s link to Nicaraguan cocaine smuggled into the US by the Contras, which had fueled the widespread crack epidemic that swept through urban areas
While the technology behind facial recognition continues to develop as its presence increases, some artists are trying to give citizens their privacy back the best way they know how—by designing contraptions that help ordinary citizens avoid detection.
In “Managing a Nightmare,” Dujmovic attributed the initial outcry over the “Dark Alliance” series to “societal shortcomings” that are not present in the spy agency.
“As a personal post-script, I would submit that ultimately the CIA-drug story says a lot more about American society on the eve of the millennium that [sic] it does about either the CIA or the media,” he wrote. “We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times–when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community.”
Hollywood knows that where there’s a good story, there’s money to be made from us – audiences only too happy to be outraged at injustice but also only too wiling to believe such “ancient” injustices offer no lessons for the present.For that reason, it is doubtful Kill the Messenger’s viewers will emerge from the film more critical news consumers. They will still trust their daily paper and the TV news, and still assume that when all the president’s men tell them of events on distant shores – from Venezuela to Iran, Syria and Ukraine – they are being told the unvarnished truth.
After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat — too radical even for Al Qaeda! — administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.
CIA defenders are out in force now that a historic report has exposed a decade of horrific American shame. Torture didn’t work, but why aren’t the architects of torture in jail?
Les films de guerre américains, comme "La Somme de toutes les peurs", où des terroristes font exploser une bombe nucléaire, font apparaître les liens étroits et renforcés, depuis le 11 septembre, entre l'industrie cinématographique et des autorités soucieuses d'améliorer leur image.
The following article was initially published in 1997. It is in part based on the work of William Blum. Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, 1995 (GR Ed. M. Ch.)
It is possible to agree that AI may pose an existential threat to humanity, but without ever having to imagine that it will become more intelligent than us.
The Disposition Matrix is a database that United States officials describe as a "next-generation capture/kill list".[1] Developed by the Obama Administration beginning in 2010, the "Disposition Matrix" goes beyond existing kill lists, and creates a blueprint for tracking, capturing, rendering, or killing suspected enemies of the US government.
Réalisé par Edward Zwick, "The siege" - trahi par son titre français "Couvre-feu" - relate avec un sens rare de l'anticipation une campagne terroriste conduite dans New-York par un groupe islamiste radical. Tourné en 1998 alors que les Etats-Unis subissaient le 7 août le double-attentat contre leurs ambassades à Nairobi et Dar-es-Salam, le film, qui n'est aucunement inspiré par l'attentat d'Oklahoma City comme l'affirme un article de Wkipédia, constitue un exemple presque parfait d'anticipation artistique d'un phénomène politique majeur.
Comme l’expose le documentaire Dirty Wars, à partir des attentats du 11 septembre 2001, la Maison Blanche a mis en œuvre de nouveaux moyens dans la guerre contre le terrorisme. Le Joint Operation Special Command est l’un d’entre eux. Cette unité d’élite qui opère sous la seule supervision de la Maison Blanche est chargée des assassinats ciblés ou des enlèvements de cibles particulières.
"Hopefully this grant program will help shift our focus from building things just because we can, toward building things because they are good for us in the long term", says FLI co-founder Meia Chita-Tegmark.
Call it guilt by metadata...
The information about where those calls and emails went, however - to a New York Times journalist - was enough to convince a jury to send Sterling to prison for up to 80 years.
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is making a big play for Silicon Valley startups and tech innovators that so far have shown little to no interest in working with the Pentagon.
To show its seriousness about engaging Silicon Valley, the Defense Department will stand up a permanent office there called “defense innovation unit experimental” — the first time the Pentagon will have a full-time outreach presence in the Valley. It will be staffed by civilian and military officials, including reservists with private-sector experience.
Carter also is proposing a pilot program to invest in startup ventures under the CIA’s existing In-Q-Tel technology incubator. According to a senior defense official, the Pentagon will make “small investments” in promising technologies in areas like electronics, software and automation.
The documentary portrays the Kathryn Bigelow movie, which purports to be a definitive account, as a skewed view that was heavily influenced by the CIA and its press office. The agency had given the filmmakers extraordinary access to classified details about the operation that they didn’t otherwise hand out to journalists.
“A lot of other people who covered the beat like I did in that search for bin Laden—we didn’t get close to that kind of cooperation from the agency on telling the inside story,” veteran Washington Post intelligence reporter Greg Miller told Frontline.
The documentary is short on news and revelations. But it concisely lays out the the dueling narratives between the CIA’s version of its so-called “rendition, detention, and interrogation” program, and the Senate Intelligence Commitee’s years-long investigation of the same. The committee’s findings conclude that the agency tortured detainees and failed to come up with useful intelligence about terrorist attacks. If you haven’t been following the minutiae of this now-decade-long controversy, the documentary will bring you up to speed.
The Frontline documentary includes a clip from Zero Dark Thirty in which a CIA torturer yells at an al Qaeda prisoner, “When you lie to me, I hurt you!” A repurposing of that line would hold true for the government and the American public — when it lies to us, it hurts us.
.. a number of major political writers have reviled the film, including New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, while Senators Dianne Feinstein, John McCain and Carl Levin wrote a letter of complaint to the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures, calling the movie “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information” that led to the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The division between political writers, politicians and critics only got more pronounced as the CIA’s acting director, Michael Morell, published an unusual disavowal of the film. When it comes to torture, Morell wrote, “the film takes significant artistic license, while portraying itself as being historically accurate.”
A new cybersecurity elite moves between government and private practice, taking state secrets with them.
To confront the surveillance state, we also have to confront the cyberintelligence ruling class and expose it for what it really is: a joint venture of government officials and private-sector opportunists with massive power and zero accountability.
“At a base minimum, people should be able to walk down a public street without fear that companies they’ve never heard of are tracking their every movement — and identifying them by name — using facial recognition technology,” the privacy advocates wrote in a joint statement. “Unfortunately, we have been unable to obtain agreement even with that basic, specific premise.”
During World War II, Nazi doctors had unfettered access to human beings they could use in medical experiments in any way they chose. In one way, these experiments were just another form of mass torture and murder so our moral judgement of them is clear.
But they also pose an uncomfortable moral challenge: what if some of the medical experiments yielded scientifically sound data that could be put to good use? Would it be justifiable to use that knowledge?
I have heard the term “rape” used as slang to imply that someone was going to put forth great effort to defeat or accomplish a task. I first think of the nickname in this context. By nicknaming a drone “Sky Raper,” operators—who are actors of the State—own the use of rape for domination and to defeat a target, while simultaneously participating in the normalization of rape as a larger systemic issue. The drone that takes this name is literally a weapon of war, operated by US persons in the War on Terror.
Horrific torture and unfathomable experiments perpetrated by the USA/CIA are finally coming to light. While seemingly disconnected, they mosaic into a terrible picture for terrible times by terrible people -- a self-fulfilling agenda of "exceptional" decisions by covert agencies, the military and pathological politicians. We will not be asked permission. It goes beyond brinkmanship. As stated in the above video, the CIA "would do the same again today." Maybe worse. Undoubtedly worse.
Many have expressed concerns about apocalyptic Terminator-like scenarios, in which robots develop the human-like ability to interact with the world all by themselves and attempt to conquer it.
These scenarios are certainly worth studying. However, they are far less plausible and far less immediate than the AI-weapons danger on the horizon now.