Reminds me of Alan Turing's wildly undernoted remarks about ESP in his seminal essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"
> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in.
(This is from a paragraph dealing with ESP's implications are for the existence of thinking machines.)
The scientists would love nothing more than to discover a whole new area of study, alas ESP doesn’t lend itself to study despite the overwhelming statistical evidence (?) because it’s made up.
It's kind of ironic how quantum physics discoveries have given these proponents new language to cloak their claims in. When you have quantum effects that depend on observation, it can be quite convincing to a lay person that an ESP ability could just as easily do the same.
I have given up on the idea that science or scientific discoveries will ever soundly banish the ideas of non-materialist claims.
It's too bad that so much of the records have been destroyed. As with the CIA torture program it is hard to hold those accountable and prevent future abuses when everything is destroyed.
I hate that podcast so much. It's practically unlistenable. There's so little content and just lame jokes. I'm always surprised when people recommend it.
(My response to) Behind the Bastards reminds me of (my response to) the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. While I emphatically agree with his POV, Michael Moore's creative voice makes me cringe. Worse, I feel that Fahrenheit 9/11 is the coloring book version of the Bush Admin's crimes and misdemeanors.
However. After watching the audience's reaction, I accept that Moore is right and I am wrong. He met people where they're at and showed them something new. Resulting in a greater awareness. I certainly could not have done that.
Given Behind the Bastard's popularity, I know that Robert Evans and friends are doing the same yeoman's work. Which I appreciate and respect very much.
These retrospectives are so important - we can understand from these historical examples how agencies can get out of control and operate without adequate oversight, management control or democratic accountability. Thank goodness reforms have been made so that excesses like those described cannot happen again
I really can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.
We already knew this before those specific abuses in the 50’s-70’s. They were already illegal, which is why they were done by the secret agencies, and not by - say - the dept. of health (directly).
Congressional oversight has only gotten weaker since the Church commission (and frankly, the Church commission only made the mildest impact from what I can tell).
That comment is brilliant because a lot of the commentary on past bad deeds exude that stance without stating it so explicitly.
Here's the general lifecycle:
1. Year 0: you are a conspiracy theorist if you think that X is doing Y
2. Year 15: only people on the fringes think that X was doing Y
3. Year [declassified documents]: Some nerd reads it, tells it to a living room full of people
4. Year [declassified documents] + 15: We have learned a lot from how X was doing Y in the past; the leaders of current X will have to reckon with this past [which is definitely the past and has nothing to do with the present]
5. Year [declassified documents] + 30: Yeah, everyone knew that X was doing Y all along, idiot. It was a different time back then and nothing about it is comparable to our current times.
This is observed post hoc rationalization behavior for a lot of subjects, but it's worth remembering that a lot of the kooky stuff from step 1 turns out to in fact be run of the mill lunacy, so there is some harsh survivorship bias.
I was using the much-maligned term “conspiracy theory”, the term used to dismiss everyone from the well-read critic to the “kooky” Lizard International Government crank, but that was just to illustrate the point about how all of these get put under the same umbrella so that they at worst can be all summarily dismissed as dummies or at sort-of best can be equivocated by way of survivorship bias.
In the Year Zero (before declassified documents) it's not a bad theory that a powerful arm of one of the superpowers in a very free nation could be used for clandestine purposes since the State has a lot to gain from keeping the free men (people) of that nation from knowing about what it is really up to.
Thankfully though we don't need to guess at this point since we have history to back us up.
Off hand thought an a small bit is a game of telephone. What people hear is completely mangled hearsay.
Problem with intelligence agencies is no feedback to keep things same like you have when what people are doing is transparent. You don't have the assumption that sooner or later there will be an accounting. It's no one will ever know.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that while, conspiracy theorist tend to both greatly exaggerate what actually happened, and use things that we have evidence of to push wild conspiracies we have no evidence of.
Let me give an example I just found. Because of this post, I looked at the Wikipedia page for MK Ultra and found this line:
> The people under this interrogation were CIA employees, U.S. military personnel, and agents suspected of working for the other side in the Cold War. Long-term debilitation and several deaths resulted from this.
Thought that was an interesting claim, so I checked the source - footnote 36 - which was Rappoport, J. (1995). "CIA Experiments With Mind Control on Children". Perceptions Magazine, p. 56. It took me a while to track that source down, but I found some pages that had it such as this one[1]:
It claims that there was a vast effort to create children sleeper CIA agents in the U.S. to control America. The evidence is based on “recovered memories,” which is a defunct technique that in the 80’s lead to conspiracies about a nationwide underground Satanic movement that was secretly controlling the U.S. Those theories, this Rappaport article, and even some comments here all lean heavily on Operation Paperclip, with the implication that the scientists the U.S. brought over post-WWII created a secret Nazi movement within our own government.
Looking at Rappaport’s website is interesting too. He believes the “Covid shots were kill shots” and that January 6 was a staged false flag event.
That’s enough time spent on crazy for me today. It takes a ton of time to track down each of these individual sources like this. Honestly, it’s exhausting, and too many people think that some evidence of wrong doing decades ago is an invitation to shut down critical thought and open the door for all sorts of craziness.
Crazy gloms onto these things - both inside and outside the gov’t, and confusion is often used as a tool by ‘friends’ and adversaries.
ARTICHOKE was the predecessor program to MKULTRA, and was explicitly to figure out how to trigger a cut-out to assassinate someone (especially high profile politicians). Here is the memo - https://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/project-artich...
(Copies of course, that I found googling around).
These were real and dangerous programs. The CIA director explicitly ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA documents 2 years before Congress started to investigate it, after a suspicious and rather public death of one of the major Directors of the program. The only reason we have much documentation at all related to it is because several reports got misfiled and were missed during the shredder party, but were found later when the investigation got started. Unfortunately they were mainly financial overviews, not useful program documents.
We know something very similar happened when Congress started looking into the CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’/torture programs. Along with active interference in the investigation. And no consequences for anyone involved.
I’m not sure being responsible/involved with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri is good. Maybe better than MKULTRA? Seems dubious though. They did finally release him instead of ‘disappearing’ him though. So that is one point in their favor I guess?
To your point, better I guess? Still a sad and unconscionable thing for the gov’t to be doing IMO.
It all comes down to how much proof you require before you believe something. Some people do not require iron clad proof before they agree something looks fishy. Others require a very high level of proof before they agree something happened. If you require a high degree of proof you will always have to wait for declassified documents or leaks before you agree on anything.
I can understand why people chose to wait. You have so many different conspiracies and most people simply do not have the time to sift through hundreds of documents to make yourself an opinion. People already barely have the time to read the news let alone follow the conspiracy rabit hole. Most people simple chose to wait and see.
It does get annoying when people immediately dismiss any doubts you have as conspiracy nonsense though. Most people believe in some form of conspiracy without realizing it. How many agree that Epstein did not kill himself?
> It all comes down to how much proof you require before you believe something.
Not really. It's about making educated guesses based on history. If some institution (a totally hypothetical one) has consistently worked a certain way based on proof for decades then you can expect it to be more likely for it to continue to do so. So if this institution tends to lie 95% of the time based on the evidence, which is more reasonable?
1. Maintain the stance that they might be lying with a high likelihood
2. Assume good faith until iron-clad evidence to the contrary (X years later). Then after that, of course, in any new scenario keep assuming good faith because there has been no FOIA or release of declassified documents yet
I agree that probably they currently have many illegal programs ongoing or in the works. But that does not tell you the exact purpose of these programs. Which of these conspiracies actually hit upon an accurate piece of information and which extrapolated a bit too far? I have zero trust in the CIA but that does not really help to judge which leaks have merit. Just because the CIA lies 95% of the time does not mean that other people cannot lie and fake documents.
> Just because the CIA lies 95% of the time does not mean that other people cannot lie and fake documents.
What material difference does this make? You're just muddying the waters. I presented a case for what kind of default stance is reasonable to take based on the available evidence. Not that one should believe everything anyone says about the CIA.
Say that the CIA provably (documented) killed 20 particular innocent people (hypothetically). Then there are five people who each claim that the CIA killed whoever (their cousin, their wife) innocent people based on no evidence. The takeaway from that is that the CIA has killed innocent people (and by extension: can do it again), not that you should believe your uncle when he says that the CIA killed his dog.
hmm very good point, that being said, I would probably tend to put more stock in the word of an honest normal person, than a proven murderous organisation accountable to nobody, but that may just be me
> Fair. So when somebody shares their pet theory about the CIA doing some shit > and they don't have evidence on hand, how do you respond?
Me personally i would listen just out of curiosity as long as it stayed civil. Most of the time it does so most of the time you can just listen and decide if you want to take it on board.
> I'm not accusing you personally of this, but the second kind of response is
> very common.
I agree yes. People forget just how crazy certain theories sounded at the time. With MKULTRA you had the government giving hard drugs to citizen to see if they could brainwash them. If i came out today and said that the government operates an underground clinic to create super soldiers people would think i have lost my marbles.
The takeaway I guess is that it’s best for any unethical top-secret programs to have as outlandish and ridiculous a premise as possible.
Even if there is a leak, no one would believe it!
That would explain why Operation Condor leaked. It needed something more outlandish. Like instead of assassinations and regime change, perhaps replacing key South American leaders with American body doubles with allegiance to the CIA?
> 2. Assume good faith until iron-clad evidence to the contrary (X years later). Then after that, of course, in any new scenario keep assuming good faith because there has been no FOIA or release of declassified documents yet
A lot of Americans suffer from "lazy decency bias". It allows for the worst of humanity to regularly skate for some heinous actions.
> Most people believe in some form of conspiracy without realizing it.
Virtually everybody does, but the term 'conspiracy theory' has twisted to mean only those theories about conspiracies which the government doesn't officially endorse. If the federal government tells the public a theory about a group of men who conspired to hijack four airliners and crash them into buildings on the same day, that is literally a conspiracy theory but isn't considered to be a conspiracy theory in the twisted colloquial sense of the word because the government endorses it as truth.
And it's not really about the evidence. How many people have personally sifted through all the evidence before deciding what to believe? Few people have the time, inclination and access. Instead people delegate that responsibility, usually to the government. The veracity of the evidence is taken on faith. For instance, how many people who take the 9/11 Commission Report as truth have even read the report itself, let alone reviewed all the evidence that supposedly backs it up? I think not many. How many people who believe the report have also heard that intact passports from four of the hijackers were supposedly found in the rubble of the fiery wrecks? How many have heard that one of those passports was supposedly found on the street of NYC, and nobody knows the identity of the person who found it?
But this theory about a conspiracy isn't a conspiracy theory because.. the government says it's true.
>As chairman of the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran (1987), Hamilton chose not to investigate President Ronald Reagan or President George H. W. Bush, stating that he did not think it would be "good for the country" to put the public through another impeachment trial.[5] Hamilton was later chair of the House October Surprise Task Force (1992).
Or, most people don’t want to believe something uncomfortable until it no longer matters (if ever), and classifying/making these programs secret is exactly so the general public (which is composed mostly of those people) has plausible deniability?
Which is also why whistleblowers get at most some feathers rustled, but rarely results in actual structural change.
Because the public mostly is concerned about how they feel, not what is actually happening.
I’m saying that the public tolerates this situation (and the CIA et al use the classification system this way) because the public prefers feeling a certain way about what their government is doing, over knowing what their government is doing.
Nominally, if the public cared more about what was actually happening:
1) Church commission type investigations would be a monthly occurrence (at the scale the gov’t current works at), not a one time fluke (historically)
2) Classified information and secret programs would require third party independent oversight (actual oversight. Not FISA like rubber stamping, which BTW came out of the Church commission investigations).
3) classified information would have very short timeframes before mandatory publication (at most a decade)
> I’m saying that the public tolerates this situation (and the CIA et al use the classification system this way) because the public prefers feeling a certain way about what their government is doing, over knowing what their government is doing.
Based on what evidence? Think about what you are saying.
1. The clandestine arms of the US government has hidden things from the public
2. But this was because the public wanted it
Explain how (2) came about.
The US was much more open about things like the Vietnam War because there was virtually no public opposition at the start of it. Then a culture of opposition eventually emerged. When Reagan took office his administration interferred in Latin America. But then they found out that they couldn't just do that in the open like in the past because there was too much public opposition. So the operations had to be more clandestine.
Public interest in US government operations abroad directly lead to a more clandestine approach—the exact opposite effect that you are claiming.
> Nominally, if the public cared more about what was actually happening:
And these things would come about how? Again, you're missing a step and somehow think that the public can will these concrete legislations into effect. How?
The US government has been around for centuries while what could be called universal democracy only came about in the 1960's (arguably). And what democracy? A stronger one than pre-WWII, but still an elite-ruled democracy.
My position is de-facto true - if it weren’t, after the Snowden leaks (among others), the next round of representatives/President would have as their top issue disbanding the NSA/CIA no? As freedom from an abusive gov’t surveillance apparatus would have to be a major concern!
Or at least there would have been a serious investigation with large scale imprisonment of gov’t employees on the top of the list of issues?
Instead, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone outside of a small minority of mostly computer geeks that cared at all. Because most folks didn’t want to look or know.
After all, the evidence in those leaks is damning. And they were very widely distributed. And they shows large scale illegal spying on the US population, abuse of power (spying on ex’s being one well documented behavior), lying to Congress and the American public, etc.
Instead, Snowden has been actively hunted down as a traitor (with pronouncements of him as a public enemy being common), a token investigation was done which resulted in no actual changes or actions except for the Director of the NSA being brought up to (verifiably) lie to Congress and the Public, and some hand waving pronouncements that they totally stopped doing what they denied doing in the first place. And then they made sure to be more clandestine. Which Congress and the public never tried to stop them from doing!
The US public wants to be ‘safe’ and know their government is ‘protecting them’, and ‘the bad guys are getting punished’. If you don’t believe me, look up the polls for those in favor of torture after 9/11. I certainly overheard it a lot! Gitmo became a common term.
That doesn’t mean they wanted to see or know about the reality of it though. If they did (despite their efforts to ignore it), it would be outrage not indifference from the general population, and it wouldn’t be a small handful of activists going after the agencies, but enterprising politicians of all stripes taking advantage of the new ‘mandate’ to clean things up.
MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE before it existed because ‘The Russians are figuring this out so we need to figure it out first’. A natural response, and if they panned out, all the sins would have been forgotten. The US would be a world power from more than just Nukes!
They have to be clandestine about the sins, and the failures though or it gets folks worked up and then they get actual problems (Church commission, funding cuts, etc.). Which as long as they hide it (and they are allowed many tools to do so) no problems.
I certainly haven’t seen any public discourse or overheard any conversations about getting rid of the ability to classify things. Have you?
It’s the ‘he’s not cheating if I don’t know about it’ response.
> My position is de-facto true - if it weren’t, after the Snowden leaks (among others), the next round of representatives/President would have as their top issue disbanding the NSA/CIA no? As freedom from an abusive gov’t surveillance apparatus would have to be a major concern!
So you have no evidence. You're just vaguely gesturing towards the lack of something.
No smoking gun. No causal link.
And you dare call this a de facto true stance?
> Or at least there would have been a serious investigation with large scale imprisonment of gov’t employees on the top of the list of issues?
What list of issues? Oh, you mean the monthly plebiscites where the citizens vote on what issues the representatives are supposed to be working on?
What are you even talking about? There is no “list of issues”. There are two parties, they decide the issues, and if the public doesn't like those issues then they foment some Culture War nonsense while the election is underway. What choice does the people have?
Vote third party? Get a rogue candidate inside one of the two Party Machines?
The US is democratic to a certain extent but it's pretty indirect.
> The US public wants to be ‘safe’ and know their government is ‘protecting them’, and ‘the bad guys are getting punished’. If you don’t believe me, look up the polls for those in favor of torture after 9/11. I certainly overheard it a lot! Gitmo became a common term.
Uh-huh. And you think the major issue that people have with the War on Terror today was that they went after terrorists? Not the fact that they invaded Iraq illegally and occupied Afghanistan for two decades despite having weak ties to Bin Laden?
And what does keeping people safe have to do with doing underhanded/clandestine/illegal shit? Precisely nothing. No one is mad about a government actually protecting its citizens. People are mad when a government agency goes so far against the credo that it has to actively hide what it's doing.
> That doesn’t mean they wanted to see or know about the reality of it though.
No evidence.
> MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE before it existed because ‘The Russians are figuring this out so we need to figure it out first’. A natural response, and if they panned out, all the sins would have been forgotten. The US would be a world power from more than just Nukes!
No evidence.
> They have to be clandestine about the sins, and the failures though or it gets folks worked up and then they get actual problems (Church commission, funding cuts, etc.). Which as long as they hide it (and they are allowed many tools to do so) no problems.
No evidence.
> I certainly haven’t seen any public discourse or overheard any conversations about getting rid of the ability to classify things. Have you?
Again the proof by omission.
> It’s the ‘he’s not cheating if I don’t know about it’ response.
No evidence.
I like that you simulteanously believe that
1. The US government conspired against all Americans by spying on them
2. The People was of course oblivious to this
3. The people of the US are so all-powerful that this would be immediately solved after the revelations if there was only enough interest to solve it
>Others require a very high level of proof before they agree something happened. If you require a high degree of proof you will always have to wait for declassified documents or leaks before you agree on anything.
A lot of those people are just too naive politically...
The trouble is, how do you effectively oversee an agency that specializes in lies, misdirection, cover-ups, coercion, and blackmail?
I also worry that our three letter agencies have collected an immense amount of dirt on Millennials and Gen-Zers. It's not hard to imagine blackmailing politicians or releasing dirt on candidates running on a platform to curtail or rein-in such agencies in order to prevent them from getting elected.
It's known that the FBI was spying on and blackmailing civil rights activists like MLK Jr. They even tried to coerce him into suicide. They were never held accountable for this, so why would they stop? And without anybody to hold them accountable, what would stop them from doing this to elected officials too?
And more recently the Congress[1] and a presidential candidate[2] —that we know of. Much we may not.
But even Congress doesn’t have the will to do anything about the apparatus. What chance does the public at large have to have their constitutional rights protected?
> our three letter agencies have collected an immense amount of dirt
This is something I can't help being reminded of any time there's "breaking news" about a political candidate and some taboo subject, even today. It seems at least naive to believe it never happens. I don't think it's too wrong to say that political candidates today either have very clean histories or "play nice" to some extent with these agencies.
I don't think you are correct. Google ngram viewer supports the idea that any occurrence of the phrase 'sopping to' is so rare as to be probably an error.
You can usually "sop up" == "soak up" something which leads to the common "sopping wet".
You can also have a "sop" == "morsel".
"Sopping to" makes no sense in English.
Sources: google ngram, wiktionary, merriam-webster, concise oxford 1971
English definitions are descriptive instead of prescriptive. In this context, an English dictionary will describe how words are used in practice rather than prescribing how they should be used in theory. It stands to reason that English dictionaries are likely to have holes in their definitions, especially in cases where words are used in novel ways.
It helps to keep in mind that a person’s written or spoken English is correct if other English speakers -- some, not all -- correctly interpret the words as having the communicator’s intended meaning. This particular case is just someone verbing with a noun, which is a common practice in informal English.
It helps to keep in mind that a person’s written or spoken English is correct if other English speakers -- some, not all -- correctly interpret the words as having the communicator’s intended meaning.
I invite you to show any evidence that anyone else has ever used "sopping to" in this sense. That's exactly my point.
In addition the "verbing with a noun" is a red-herring. Sopping has meanings related to being small or wet/absorbent. So, you could verb that noun all you wanted and succeed only in confusing your audience. That's the best thing to keep in mind: are you communicating or obfuscating.
Whatever floats your boat, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Think outside the box. (I’m not in a box, though...?) Not everything needs to be so literal.
This is an oddly defensive response considering the time they took to etymologically dig into an expression that I and likely 99% of native English speakers have never encountered, despite your claims of it being a perfectly cromulent word.
Actually I was not complaining. I was trying to help: both you and anyone else reading that might believe your assertion that "sopping to" has the meaning you believe.
The beauty of English (one of the sluttiest languages in the world) is you can verb anything. And there is no académie to come arrest me for it! Muahaha
"Sopping to" still does not have any common accepted meaning though. So, if you want to communicate with other users of English it might be a good idea not to use that phrase. You want both your listeners and you to agree on what it means and as far as I can tell only you know that.
Sigh, the word sop already has a verb form - you're making progressively less sense with each subsequent reply. If you want to "smith" a new expression, it might behoove you to spend more time at the anvil.
Which is also the reason why a lot of the TikTok "but I'd rather CCP have my info than US agencies" is so infuriating. As if China isn't looking for influence with younger up-and-coming politicos. The utter lack of understanding from how much information about you the analysis of just "metadata" is that what can be learned from the actual "data" that data hoarders can collect is just mindblowingly naive to me.
What does China have to do with the evils of the US intelligence community? Why even bring them up? What does potentially seeking influence with people have to do with blackmailing people or other COINTELPRO activities that were used to disrupt civil rights activists?
i wasn't bringing in China just for the sake of it. if you read enough threads here on HN, you'll see people making comments "i'd rather the CCP have my data than the TLAs of the US, since the CCP has no jurisdiction". it's a strawman privacy argument. invasion of privacy is bad regardless of the "who" is doing it. all of the pervasive tracking that is occurring has so many levels of knock-on effects that just get ignored or overlooked or whatever other term for being allowed is just not a good thing and should be something not allowed.
They’re dismissing it because using TikTok now is fun (or at least interesting) and those other things you’re talking about are not - and they can’t do anything about them anyway.
They're dismissing it because they're like a flamingo with their head deliberately in the sand. Critically thinking about things makes their head hurt.
It seems weird to target tiktok (or china for that matter) when everyone hoovers up and sells your data as a matter of fact. Everyone. And they all have bad intentions. What's so specially trustworthy about american fuckery over chinese?
It was sarcastic, and your additional commentary is also accurate. We do need more systems to actively protect citizens against these kinds of abuses.
It’s “uncommon” in the sense that a very small % of government employees are involved in these, but it’s common in the sense that something along these lines are always ongoing.
This stuff is terrible, but if it's framed around "what are the dark secrets of Americas national security agency." It is kinda pathetic. I am glad no Unit 731 level stuff has come out about the USA.
Exactly this. Who thinks this agency just went quietly into the night?
They have a "public" budget of $24 billion and probably countless other dark money funds. We know they made money for their operations by running crack cocaine TO THE UNITED STATES already.
The story of "operation acoustic kitty" being squashed by a taxi is presented without skepticism; they don't mention that
> this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and "the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards".
Jokes aside, I don't know how to feel about that one. It's just so nonsensically stupid and absurd, on the one hand, but on the other how much does that really make it stand out among the CIA era with which it's contemporaneous? But merely that it's plausible seems indictment enough.
Why is it "so nonsensically stupid and absurd"? This was an era before you could just deploy a tiny quad copter. In WW2 we used live bats in bombs to start fires. We taught certain birds to peck TV screens to guide missiles. We tried to teach dogs to find land mines and dive under tanks so we could explode them. We thought of using live chickens to keep nuclear land mines warm for long enough to be effective.
There was an era where "lets make a small animal do it" was the technology of the day, and it overlapped with "lets turn everything into a listening device for the [soviet|american] embassy"
Yes, and aside from predating the CIA thing by two decades, none of those other projects produced anything worth a damn either.
That includes the strict subset that made it so far as an attempt at implementation - and I note also none of the projects you list involved cats, famously the least biddable among animals common in both household and farmstead. Even Skinner was more sensible than that!
So I suppose I have to thank you for making such a strong argument in support, however unintentionally.
This article is far from the only source, including some from within the agency, to provide a relatively credulous account of "Project Acoustic Kitty".
I don't know why the article author didn't, aside from that this doesn't seem the sort of journal where that level of bibliography is common.
For my own sake, because this has been out there for a couple decades at least, and I trust you are at least as able as I am to find all the sources you desire - and without needing to suspect I might've hand-picked mine to support my thesis, besides.
If you make a claim, you should be able to stand behind it, by citing it. Responding with circular logic about who's responsibility it is to actual research is counter productive, and giving the appearance that you don't actual have a citation to back up what you are saying at all.
Yeah, and commenting on HN while I'm in a bitchy mood isn't especially productive either.
I don't have my copy of The Wizards of Langley immediately to hand, but that's where I remember first seeing details of the project, ages back. When I get the chance I'll see what that has for further reference; given the time of its publication, I suspect a lot of other sources derive at least in part from there.
I'm not sure why they'd go with UAP programs as a distraction. Plain old politics and division will dominate headlines and discussions much more easily.
There may be a more economical explanation for indulging some of the more insane stuff they got up to. Who cares what the narrative is so long as you control it? If leaks got out, there was a short list of where they came from, the absurd stuff imposed costs on adversaries who had to verify it because they couldn’t afford not to, it provided freedom for some very smart people, was a way of distributing pork to favoured donors, and it harnessed the most diabolical elements of society and put them into service for national interests. There’s a simple idea that has some predictive power about these operations and programs. It’s that, the lie is the power, and each secures the other. If it’s believable and there are costs to believing it, and maybe you get some information out of it, that’s a powerful story. If you can leak a story about ESP, or even aliens as a way to regain narrative control at pivotal political moments, that’s a valuable service as well. People can flatter themselves by thinking you’re an idiot, and underestimate you too. The irony is the optimistic case for these programs is the one most unacceptably cynical.
This almost seems like psyops to have anyone believe that "second and third rate" minds are bumbling around and failing. Secondly, I think the CIA gets the brunt of the focus and criticism because its funded by the most powerful nation state in the world. Would another country do better (ethically, morally etc.?) Human/social problems don't have technological solutions, anyways.
> Secondly, I think the CIA gets the brunt of the focus and criticism because its funded by the most powerful nation state in the world. Would another country do better (ethically, morally etc.?)
The actually existing and most powerful such agency in the world gets the brunt of the focus compared to lesser agencies and hypothetical ones? I hope so.
> Would another country do better (ethically, morally etc.?
This seems like a rhetorical question (answered with "yes"), or are you implying that it is a strange coincidence that the nation responsible for the largest ethnic cleansing in the last 500 years (that of North America, which inspired Adolf Hitler), and the only one to deploy nuclear bombs on civilians, would also happen to have an unaccountable intelligence agency that inspires comic book villains?
> the largest ethnic cleansing in the last 500 years (that of North America
It’s my understanding that almost all deaths of the original people in America was due to disease that was not understood well enough to be weaponized.
I don’t see how the size of the deliberate ethnic cleansing that did take place can be greater than other far larger genocides.
If you violently displace entire peoples from their land and food supply, and then they die "nonviolently" of poverty/disease a short time later, you are still to blame. That's clearly ethnic cleansing, even if it may fall short of genocide.
That's a good point. There must be some Google Deepmind-level geniuses out there with a patriotic and/or sociopathic streak happy to work for Uncle Sam
There's a comparison to be made there with screwing up people's thinking patterns at a societal level, just to be able to direct their attention towards advertisements. :/
The 1953 probable assassination of Frank Olson by the CIA could use a little more expansion - and he wasn't so much a biochemist as a microbiologist. He apparently was working on a specific program called ARTICHOKE in 1953 that involved torture and assassination using the MKULTRA arsenal of drugs and poisons:
> "Cournoyer also told them Olson learned biological weapons, including anthrax, were used during the Korean War, despite denials by the U.S. government. Cournoyer repeated his story in a 2002 German TV documentary film, “Code Name ARTICHOKE,” which can be seen on YouTube."
That would be enough of a reason for the CIA to conduct an assassination. It didn't become public that the USA had collected all of Japan's biological warfare data and given Shiro Ishii, head of that program, amnesty for his Mengele-like crimes until the 1970s. If all that had been revealed in 1953, it would have made US denial of the use of biological weapons in North Korea much less plausible.
For more background on Olson and the CIA, this paper (Kuzmarov 2020) looks good:
> "In 1947, Olson and Rosebury produced a technical monograph after constructing a
special chamber for the study of “airborne clouds of highly infective agents” that recommended the use of airplanes as the “best delivery systems for biological agents.” In May of the previous year, members of Congress hoping to secure support for a $4.6 million naval appropriations bill, leaked to the Associated Press news about a “new germ spray capable of wiping out large cities and entire crops at a single blow, a secret weapon” deliverable from high-flying planes, “far more deadly than the atomic bomb.”"
I can guess what happened: under the influence of an unexpected dose of LSD, Olson (a previously straight-laced company man by all accounts) suddenly realized that he didn't want to spend his life making bioweapons and torture/assassination tools. Outcomes like that had a lot to do with the CIA giving up on LSD (as well as its later criminalization by the state).
It seems to be a popular belief that biological weapons research was abandoned by all rational governments because biological weapons can't be controlled and the infections would travel back to their source. But anthrax doesn't have this problem. The spores are highly infectious, if you dust an area with anthrax spores it has a devastating effect. But at the same time, anthrax is barely contagious from person-to-person. If you take basic hazmat precautions and burn the bodies, there is little risk of the anthrax spreading out of control. The area spores were dropped on may remain deadly for decades, but that won't spontaneously spread to other areas. It's a practical and effective biological weapon.
In 1972, the Soviets accidentally released a cloud of anthrax spores from from one of their research/production facilities. It killed at least 68 people in that area, maybe many more, but didn't spread uncontrollably through the population.
Possible with relatively low specificity and sensitivity (high false positives, high false negatives, respectively). But society's concept of "race" is nearly exclusively limited to physical appearance and has no basis in any part of the genotype which doesn't affect visual phenotype. Therefore to achieve high specificity and sensitivity you'd need a bioweapon which targets individuals based on complex combinations of genes which together govern physical appearance, often in relatively subtle ways.
This is relatively impossible because overall physical appearance isn't a vector for infections. Even if you did this relatively impossible thing, you'd get a lot of false positives and negatives for most populations due to intermixing -- Latin America for example has very, very few groups of indigenous populations which aren't significantly mixed with the European colonizers' genes.
When I say it's "possible with relatively low specificity and sensitivity" I mean that you could find other genes that are somewhat loosely correlated with our current definitions of "race", such as how some Africans are somewhat more likely to have sickle-cell disease (SCD) and that provides about a 75% protection against HIV, and heterogenous carriers of the gene (SCT - Sickle Cell Trait) have about 40% lower incidence rate of HIV. But even in the most concentrated areas of Africa, only 3% of some populations have SCD.
And that dismal math will repeat for any "race-based" infection system -- you might be able to get slightly higher rates of infection in another target "race" but it won't be dramatically different enough from the effects on your constituent population to make it useful.
A lot of comments about how reflection on history is important and that not destroying records is important. IMO though, if society, in reality, had an appropriately strong distaste for this sort of thing we would simply rid ourselves of these "agencies" (I'd argue the term "criminal organizations" is more accurate based on their violations of the constitution.)
However, seventy-plus years of history show that society simply does not care about what does not affect them so let the drug running, experiments, torture, surveillance continue as long as we can fill up the car and get to Target without too much hassle.
This is an unpopular opinion here, but this article clearly suffers from reporting bias (successful projects don't get declassified) and selection bias (they found ~5 unethical/failed projects out of how many in CIA history)?
There are clearly classified programs that we know of that were wildly successful: the atomic and hydrogen bombs, U2 spy plane, reconnaissance satellites, and probably more that I can't think of now.
I would be interested in how this compares with other countries with intelligence programs of similar size. Could one find a handful of examples of unethical/failed projects from China, France, Russia, or the UK?
A program is not some discreet, one time, thing, it's an extended process involving many many decision points: It's pretty flippant to pretend that statistic reasoning developed for when you draw things out of a hat is equally valid when talking about the chances you will produce a 20 year long enterprise of illegal human experimentation.
I was thinking if it's still in use, presumably it would not get released?
Upon thinking about this a little more, it's possible that a project was successful, but it became public (like the atomic bombs) or it is just obsolete and superseded by another project.
This makes me wonder. I have a few side projects which if they ever got in front of a real engineer, they would poke so many holes in it and make me look like an incompetent impostor. Yes, transparency and insight into codebases is good and all, and enjoys scrutiny, but it's those hidden side projects I love working on, because there's no accountability (apart from me being better than before), and I can do whatever I want, without 'managerial oversight'.
There is a reasonable case to be made that the Nazis' escaped WW2 and were imported into the USA, and they created their Fifth Reich within the military-industrial complex where - under the guise of the oppressive National Security regime that this complex wraps itself in - they have been perfectly able to continue to propagate their hateful ideology.
And this is why the USA has demolished one sovereign state after the other - deemed inferior by America's bigoted ruling classes, whose malign influence over the 'intelligence community' follows the Nazi playbook to a tee .. those cultures deemed racially/politically inferior are brought nothing but calamity and ruin.
I agree. It's also worth noting that Hitler himself was inspired by the US Jim Crow laws and history of violent racism. He used it as a model for his own ethnic cleansing. So for a long time Nazis and the US have had a symbiotic relationship.
The CIA and, by extension, the US government as a whole have never altered the outcome of elections anywhere for regime change, and have never instigated color revolutions for regime change.
Those were shameful, but “legal”, at least by USA law. Federal agencies have also undertaken a shocking number of illegal shameful programs domestically within the USA, consequences only came about for a few of those programs, and we continue to lack systems which can guarantee that even definitely-illegal shameful domestic programs can’t be undertaken currently or in the future.
If the CIA was competent enough to create mass protests to oust leaders, and not leave significant evidence of their involvement, they'd oust Putin and a bunch of others they don't like.
They don't create them, they foment them. Like in the most recent protests in Iran, we were agitating those but it's not like we created them out of nothing. Those divisions and issues are very real. And we tried our hardest to use them to overthrow the government, but there just wasn't enough momentum. And I think the same was initially true in Ukraine, so we took it to the next level.
This [1] is John McCain, in Kyiv, giving a speech trying to embolden and agitate the protesters onward. 'America is with you. I am with you! Your destiny lies in Europe!' It seems unlikely that we would have done that if we thought the protests would have organically led to insurrection (even with covert instigation), because not only does it make our involvement completely overt, but it's also just a ridiculously hostile action.
Imagine if in the leadup to January 6th, you had some high ranking Chinese official, in DC, riling up protesters 'China is with you. I am with you! Your destiny lies in a multipolar world!' It's just so unimaginably crass and overt that it would be just shy of a defacto declaration of war, as it's obviously an effort to try to rile up a group of people to overthrow a democratically elected government.
It wasn't a "public statement of support." That was a rally held in Kyiv, headed by the US. This was the US being on the ground, in and among the protesters and making a very visible point of it. It's likely because CIA ops to agitate and embolden the protesters 'quietly' failed, so they needed a more visible demonstration to show the protesters we'd have their back in case of an insurrection.
I argued the CIA clearly clearly isn't capable of entirely secretly creating protests. You insisted they "foment them" instead. Now you're claiming they also fail at fomenting them.
And also John McCain somehow surpassed the efforts of the entire CIA by giving a speech? Guy was amazing.
Why would you think it'd be amazing? You can achieve vastly more acting openly than you can by acting secretly. The US overtly and openly rallying anti-government protesters, encouraging them to overthrow their government, right in front of said government, was just a ridiculous power play. It's going to not only help embolden the existing protesters, but bring every single person with an inkling of anti-government sentiment out of the wood work because "this might be it!" And well, it was "it."
The only reason the CIA exists (in terms of ops, and not intelligence) is for secrecy. The "problem" is that in Ukraine there's zero debate as to whether the democratic government was fairly elected - they were. And we, the country that runs around raving about the sanctity of democracy, were working to overthrow them. It's really not a good look, even less so when we started doing it openly (if only because now I can simply point to videos showing it clear as day), and one of the endless examples of how you create people like me.
A fundamental assumption of many conspiracy theories is that you can manage this stuff in total secrecy, and maintain that secret for decades, despite presumably involving a huge number of people.
To go further - A regime that would put the US in position to cut off the highly dependent EU from Russian LNG. Hundreds of billions of dollars of profit are at stake. Which is why the US bombed Nord Stream, it’s also why the current President’s son was on a board he knew nothing about, along with other congress critters families at different companies.
Blowing up the pipeline did nothing but void the non-delivery penalties Russia would have faced if it cut supply as it was threatening. Contract law doesn't care about military invasions.
And Mike Benz is not a source on anything. He was appointed by Trump with no competence to some corner of the State Dept for 6 months then left.
Actually yes with an internet full conspiracy and misinfo, insisting on good sourcing is an excellent way of navigating the noise. This guy has zero credibility.
And the point he is making is that some in Europe will gladly see Ukraine destroyed if it means cheaper gas. We should not be holding that opinion up as reasonable or even moral, it's not.
"I know you are but what I am" is something we teach children not to say, because the logic is circular and self defeating.
And using different, disposable handles is basic privacy protection. Using the same one for years means someone, somewhere is profiling you. Best case, it's just a marketer trying to sell you something.
Yes Ukraine was referenced. I get it, writing off a war as a conspiracy means you don't have to acknowledge what is happening, which allows pro-Russian individuals to not have to critically think about why their support the aggressor in a genocidal war.
I wonder if these researchers self-select for being terrible because they couldn't compete in the "marketplace" for publicly funded or corporate grants/employment?
And yet so many on this forum seem convinced that such programs are no longer taking place, despite many examples of such data only coming out years later
According to Wikipedia, it's been at least 10 months since the US got caught doing this sort of thing illegally (trainers being complicit in steroid use during training):
Having taken both, I’m not sure if modafinil is really “more effective“ but it absolutely has fewer psychoactive side effects overall. Ranks somewhere between caffeine and amphetamine in efficacy and side effects.
I’m much more comfortable with service members being given modafinil than amphetamine.
Modafinil can still cause an increase in risk-taking behavior (certainly did for me), but if you absolutely need to be awake and functioning for 30-70 hours at a time it’s probably the least worst option. I’ve tried most stimulants, legal and illegal, and have had jobs that required me to be awake for 70+ hours straight in an environment not so different from military work (minus encounters with hostile forces).
I think the most right solution is “don’t put people in positions where they have to work more than 14 hours or stay awake more than 20 hours” but while that is possible for corporations to guarantee to workers, it’s not always possible for militaries to guarantee to soldiers.
Many might do better to focus on advocacy rather than ignorance. Not sure why secret cat experiments should matter that much in the stark reality of:
"Overall, 48% say there are some circumstances under which the use of torture is acceptable in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts; about as many (49%) say there are no circumstances under which the use of torture is acceptable." (2017)
This stuff is completely mainstream. The first episode of Blue Bloods (2010) had Tom Selleck correcting his DA daughters portrayal of police torture of a subject as thoughtful "enhanced interrogation". I can turn on the TV anytime and see this sort of stuff. It's as normal as apple pie.
I'm convinced MKULTRA isn't still going on simply because it was based on faulty assumptions about how the brain works and how easily it can be manipulated. Not that there aren't likely programs with similar intent going on (more focused on influencing the masses rather than programming individuals) but the whole "mind-breaking people with LSD and trauma" genre of conspiracy theory probably isn't real.
Also I don't know what you mean by "so many," when the default consensus on HN is often very much pro-conspiracy.
>the whole "mind-breaking people with LSD and trauma" genre of conspiracy theory probably isn't real.
Though there isn't anything showing the continued use of LSD, the use of trauma to mind-break people continued until at least 2008 under the guise of "enhanced interrogation.". Black sites still seem to exist, so it's unclear if it really stopped.
>the use of trauma to mind-break people continued until at least 2008 under the guise of "enhanced interrogation.".
That isn't a continuation of MKULTRA though, it's just torturing prisoners, and torture is notorious for not being an effective means of interrogation (which is why I'm convinced the only reason it was being pushed by the Bush administration post 9/11 was simply pandering to American bloodlust.) People will just as easily lie to make the pain stop as tell the truth.
You see both as attempts to get people to say/do what the CIA wants and that they're both based on a faulty understanding of how the mind works. That's enough for me to view them as a continuation, even if some of the details differ.
I suspect that most people are susceptible to such techniques. It's not hard to find historical examples of mass delusions or bouts of madness in large populations. Sometimes something like a severe drought (hunger) convinces an entire society that human sacrifice is a good idea in order to improve the weather.
Why wouldn't similar things cause most people to break when a team of people are working to break them, with the aid of drugs and otherwise to make the trauma seem real?
I think there's a difference between breaking someone and breaking them in a specific way that allows them to be controlled. As far as I know, the MKULTRA documents themselves show their experiments to be a failure. Pumping someone full of LSD then playing "kill the President" over headphones doesn't work.
The closest working analogue I can come up with to MKULTRA's goals is cult indoctrination, and that only works so long as someone remains within the cult's sphere of influence.
Well a contrived example of a bad or ineffective technique is not a counter point. Nor, of course, is MKULTRA docs themselves that claim ineffectiveness, whatever small, unredacted amount of which we're privvy to.
People do break and defect to other countries all the time. It happened numerous times on both sides during the Cold War. Surely part of that process is convincing your captive or target that your side's "cause or mission" is better than the one they came from.
To what extent is that even wrong I don't know. What is a culture but a cult on a grander scale (as has sometimes been said of religion)? Not all cults need be death cults.
You can't just tell someone to do something repetitiously and they blindly follow the order. You would have to convince the person that if they didn't do something, the world would be worse off or something even more horrific would happen in a fictional alternate universe if that person was not stopped.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss what you believe doesn't work. Any government willing to subject its own citizens to what happened at MKUltra is capable of forging documents and releasing them with the goal of making the readers believe the experiments were complete failures.
OK, but at that point we're assuming some or all of the evidence that exists for MKULTRA was fabricated, intentionally declassified and released, while taking for granted that those documents are still accurate except for any part that discredit the program's effectiveness.
That the government wanted the public to know that these heinous experiments were taking place, just to try to convince them they didn't work, when it would have been much easier and more effective to simply never reveal them to begin with if they did work.
And if what the MKULTRA documents themselves say don't matter, then all of this is just a matter of faith. What is there to even discuss if the evidence doesn't matter one way or the other? Anything could be a coverup, false flag or misdirection.
"[...]when it would have been much easier and more effective to simply never reveal them to begin with if they did work."
I don't necessarily agree with what you're suggesting as being simpler. It may, in fact, be simpler to reveal the experiments and discredit them by using forged documents. Regardless of what may be simpler, I don't think it's scientific to take either position, which is why I prefer an agnostic stance when reading things that essentially require taking a faith-based position.
MKULTRA in the LSD sense is garbage. Look into Monarch if you want an understanding of what is realistically likely possible. I have dealt with several victims of the process as patients, and I can assure you that quite a bit of it is real.
You can look at the videos of the congressional testimony if you want more information.
Reminds me of this great joke from the late comedian Trevor Moore: "What if governments learned from the MKUltra experiments in the 50's that trauma allows you to control people, so they purposely orchestrate disastrous events to keep their citizens afraid + dependent on them, and that's one of the reasons that mental illness has been rising? lol"
> When the family took legal action, government lawyers threatened witnesses with prosecution under the Espionage Act. Decades later, CIA Director Stansfield Turner admitted that “some unwitting testing took place,” but testified to Congress that the subjects were “criminal sexual psychopaths confined at a State hospital.”
Of course, since they found their "moral compass", and now they don't do that stuff any longer. /s
Purely hypothetically, assuming that they wanted to run some of these shady things and fearing some whistleblower might expose it, or Congress might start asking too many questions, what should they do? They would create stupid program like "study behavior of cats", and then assign it to a "friendly" foreign country and run it like that. On paper it looks like a silly waste of money. Oh well, when hasn't that happened... If they get caught, cancel the program, create another one like "study behavior of dogs" and assign the work again to the same "friendly" team. Any real "work" results and assignments are received in person only and kept compartmentalized.
I suspect if the US collapses the remains will probably end up ruled by someone from the intelligence agencies, like what happened with Putin in Russia. In both Soviet Russia and the modern US, no entity has more power than the intelligence agencies.
This is a US-government narrative. The CIA is obviously controlled by the US government. Yet it can be used as a scapegoat whenever the US is caught—oh, it was the Deep State/CIA which did it, not really the government per se.
> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in.
(This is from a paragraph dealing with ESP's implications are for the existence of thinking machines.)
https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf