Friday, September 6, 2013
The conspiracy theorists were right!
appalled security expert concedes
Tells of widespread shock among cyber professionals
From the New York Times:
Mr. Kaminsky said that there had been “a tremendous amount of good will between the cryptographic community and N.S.A. that’s built been up,” referring to experts on encryption. “That is gone,” he said.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
NSA reportedly stole or doctored
encryption keys of internet firms
'Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified NSA documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.' -- ProPublica
http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption
encryption keys of internet firms
'Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified NSA documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.' -- ProPublica
http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-to-crack-undermine-internet-encryption
Friday, August 30, 2013
Claiming password flub, London
gears up to charge Greenwald
Britain's Daily Telegraph reports that the terms of a court order "were widened so police have specific permission to analyse whether Mr Miranda, and others, have breached the Official Secrets Acts or a section of the Terrorism Act 2000 which make it an offence to possess information which may be useful to terrorists."
British authorities argue that the Glenn Greenwald's courier, David Miranda, had shown very poor security judgment, showing that Guardian journalists could not be trusted with secret data. They said he had carried a password that they used to decipher some, but not most, of the data.
But Greenwald said the government had been unable to get access to the encrypted files, tweeting: "Anyone claiming that David Miranda was carrying a password that allowed access to documents is lying. UK itself says they can't access them."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10276460/David-Miranda-was-carrying-password-for-secret-files-on-piece-of-paper.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/partner-of-nsa-leaks-reporter-carried-paper-with-password-says-uk/?comments=1
Britain's Daily Telegraph reports that the terms of a court order "were widened so police have specific permission to analyse whether Mr Miranda, and others, have breached the Official Secrets Acts or a section of the Terrorism Act 2000 which make it an offence to possess information which may be useful to terrorists."
British authorities argue that the Glenn Greenwald's courier, David Miranda, had shown very poor security judgment, showing that Guardian journalists could not be trusted with secret data. They said he had carried a password that they used to decipher some, but not most, of the data.
But Greenwald said the government had been unable to get access to the encrypted files, tweeting: "Anyone claiming that David Miranda was carrying a password that allowed access to documents is lying. UK itself says they can't access them."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10276460/David-Miranda-was-carrying-password-for-secret-files-on-piece-of-paper.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/partner-of-nsa-leaks-reporter-carried-paper-with-password-says-uk/?comments=1
N.Y. Times editor, Brit officials huddled on leaks
Jill Abramson, editor of the New York Times, met with British officials concerning data leaked by Edward Snowden and shared by the Guardian with the Times, the Guardian reports. No further meetings between the British and Abramson have occurred since, said the Guardian.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
How much data does the NSA really get?
I consider this analysis by Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at the City University of New York, to be far superior to my own, which appeared here recently.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/nsa-internet-traffic-surveillance
I consider this analysis by Jeff Jarvis, journalism professor at the City University of New York, to be far superior to my own, which appeared here recently.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/nsa-internet-traffic-surveillance
Monday, August 12, 2013
Available data hints
NSA'S daily net message take
is on the order of 350 million
The NSA released data which permit a ball park estimate of how many internet messages it sifts and how many it examines. The NSA statement does not give percentages that would permit an estimate of the number of domestic messages picked up by the NSA. But some 8700 messages of U.S. residents are being examined daily without warrants, according to a very rough calculation based on NSA data.
We follow in the footsteps of Enrico Fermi and try to arrive at reasonable estimates based on incomplete data. First, we have the agency's admission that its robots select messages that, altogether, carry 0.016 x 1.826 x 10^15 bytes of internet information daily (about 30 trillion bytes daily). I was able to find an estimate of the average number of bytes per email message put at 75 x 10^3 bytes. Further, I found an estimate of the average number of bytes per web page put at 10^6 bytes. We are taking this second average to include Facebook posts of foreigners and some Americans.
Let's guess that a typical instant message in one direction is one or two sentences, and split the difference. A good rule of thumb is 10 words per sentence at 5 characters per word (plus spaces, which we can neglect). Or about 1500 characters per message (conversations being composed of a sequence of messages). One character is worth one byte.
We have 0.016 x 1.826 x 10^15 bytes = 2.9 x 10^13 bytes scanned by the NSA. From here out, in order to keep our estimates kosher, we'll just stick with orders of magnitude. The proportions of types of messages sifted by the NSA we estimate -- reasonably but not certainly -- at 70% emails (averaging 10^5 bytes each), 20% web pages (10^6 bytes each) and 0.05% chat and instant messaging messages (10^4 bytes each). Of course, it's possible to shift these percentages about a bit and we'll get different results, but what we have is plausible.
Plugging in the numbers, we estimate that NSA robots are flagging on the order of 350 million messages a day with some 875,000 messages a day examined. If 1 % of the inspected messages involve U.S. residents, we get 8700 messages per day being inspected without warrants.
We might be off by 100 million or so for the bulk scanning, but we are very likely in the right range. Similarly, our estimate of messages of Americans inspected without warrants might be as low as 2,000 or so. But it seems like a good bet that thousands of messages of Americans are being subjected to warrantless examination daily. And, in light of the high probability -- recently pointed out in a New York Times report -- that virtually all internet messages to and from the United States appear to be going through an NSA sieve, the figures seem plausible enough.
This puts in context the agency's attempt to minimize its surveillance by showing that it only sieves a tiny amount of internet traffic.
The "scope and scale of NSA collection," can be seen, the agency said, by this:
"According to figures published by a major tech provider, the Internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of
information per day. In its foreign intelligence mission, NSA touches about 1.6% of that. However,
of the 1.6% of the data, only 0.025% is actually selected for review. The net effect is that NSA
part in a million. Put another way, if a standard basketball court represented the global
collection would be represented by an area smaller than a
dime on that basketball court."
However, in talking about scale, the statement omits the collection of telephone data.
NSA'S daily net message take
is on the order of 350 million
The NSA released data which permit a ball park estimate of how many internet messages it sifts and how many it examines. The NSA statement does not give percentages that would permit an estimate of the number of domestic messages picked up by the NSA. But some 8700 messages of U.S. residents are being examined daily without warrants, according to a very rough calculation based on NSA data.
We follow in the footsteps of Enrico Fermi and try to arrive at reasonable estimates based on incomplete data. First, we have the agency's admission that its robots select messages that, altogether, carry 0.016 x 1.826 x 10^15 bytes of internet information daily (about 30 trillion bytes daily). I was able to find an estimate of the average number of bytes per email message put at 75 x 10^3 bytes. Further, I found an estimate of the average number of bytes per web page put at 10^6 bytes. We are taking this second average to include Facebook posts of foreigners and some Americans.
Let's guess that a typical instant message in one direction is one or two sentences, and split the difference. A good rule of thumb is 10 words per sentence at 5 characters per word (plus spaces, which we can neglect). Or about 1500 characters per message (conversations being composed of a sequence of messages). One character is worth one byte.
We have 0.016 x 1.826 x 10^15 bytes = 2.9 x 10^13 bytes scanned by the NSA. From here out, in order to keep our estimates kosher, we'll just stick with orders of magnitude. The proportions of types of messages sifted by the NSA we estimate -- reasonably but not certainly -- at 70% emails (averaging 10^5 bytes each), 20% web pages (10^6 bytes each) and 0.05% chat and instant messaging messages (10^4 bytes each). Of course, it's possible to shift these percentages about a bit and we'll get different results, but what we have is plausible.
Plugging in the numbers, we estimate that NSA robots are flagging on the order of 350 million messages a day with some 875,000 messages a day examined. If 1 % of the inspected messages involve U.S. residents, we get 8700 messages per day being inspected without warrants.
We might be off by 100 million or so for the bulk scanning, but we are very likely in the right range. Similarly, our estimate of messages of Americans inspected without warrants might be as low as 2,000 or so. But it seems like a good bet that thousands of messages of Americans are being subjected to warrantless examination daily. And, in light of the high probability -- recently pointed out in a New York Times report -- that virtually all internet messages to and from the United States appear to be going through an NSA sieve, the figures seem plausible enough.
This puts in context the agency's attempt to minimize its surveillance by showing that it only sieves a tiny amount of internet traffic.
The "scope and scale of NSA collection," can be seen, the agency said, by this:
"According to figures published by a major tech provider, the Internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of
information per day. In its foreign intelligence mission, NSA touches about 1.6% of that. However,
of the 1.6% of the data, only 0.025% is actually selected for review. The net effect is that NSA
part in a million. Put another way, if a standard basketball court represented the global
collection would be represented by an area smaller than a
dime on that basketball court."
However, in talking about scale, the statement omits the collection of telephone data.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
In light of the current national debate over vast surveillance powers by what many see as a secret parallel government, Newz from Limbo is reprinting an updated article on the potential for psychotronic weaponry that could easily be used clandestinely on Americans.
Nearly all links on my essay have gone the way of all entropy since this piece first appeared in 2002. This version of August 2013 has not kept pace with the breath-taking revolution in electronic-mind interfaces over the past decade, but updates links as well as possible and makes a few minor editorial changes.
Another important link: Human auditory system response to modulated electromagnetic energy by Allan H. Frey, General Electric Advanced Electronics Center, Cornell University http://www.raven1.net/frey.htm
If a link fails, try pasting it into the browser bar.
By PAUL CONANT
People with reputations to safeguard dodge the subject of psychotronic weapons as if it were as far beyond the pale of responsible journalistic and scientific discourse as is the subject of UFOs. Ergo, psychotronic weaponry is a delusion.***
Never mind that there was a bill in Congress that would ban space-based psychotronic weapons (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/
DUTCH REPORT PSYCHOTRONIC EFFECTS
Kucinich wasn't so kooky after all. An October 2003 report supported by the Dutch Economics Ministry found that radio waves covering a mobile phone district affect cognitive functions, boosting memory and response times among people close enough to the transmitter. The study, done by TNO, found that the radio waves broadcast to current second-generation European phones and those waves to be used for third-generation phones --which have rapid data-transfer capabilities-- both affected cognitive functions. The study also found that third-generation signals had a significant impact, including tingling sensations, nausea and headaches. See http://www.emrpolicy.org/news/
A good rundown on the cell phone health issue is found at http://www.rare-leadership.
DARPA'S MIND-BOGGLING PLAN
A monkey just thinks, a system of electrodes detects the thought, and, voila!, a robot-arm moves, Darpa-funded researchers at Duke and MIT announced in October 2003.
Actually, Anthony J. Tether, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, unveiled the breakthrough in a little-noticed speech last year. Darpa was rushing pell-mell to develop a thought-controlled robot warrior, he said. 'Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine controlled by our thoughts,' Tether said. 'The genie is out of the bottle on this possibility' of thought-guided weapons, he said.
'The nation that first gains this possibility will dominate.'
The thought-control device works by detecting a specific pattern of electrical activity in the brain and translating that into a signal to the robot's motor system.
In other words, the scientists have discovered that patterns of electrical activity can be identified as thoughts or intentions.
Tether did not announce, but we may take for granted, that Darpa will also focus on means of stimulating electrical patterns in the brain that replicate thoughts. The idea would be for the target to mistake the imputed thoughts for his own.
In fact, as this essay shows, it is highly probable that the CIA, the Pentagon and defense contractors have been long hard at work on covert behavior manipulation via electronic means.
However, what is likely to be developed here is the fine-tuning of mental manipulation capabilities. Instead of being able to simply impute some emotional reaction, such as fear or anger, by electronic means, the possibility arises of false thought-intentions such as 'I want to leave the room' being directly imputed.
No doubt military researchers, prompted by the revolution in MRI imaging, will catalogue electrical patterns from many persons in order to identify patterns common to many. Possibly, someone sitting at a Darpa computer could type in the thoughts he wants a target to have and the computer could use a set of signals to broadcast to the target's brain.
A partial antidote to such machinations is that now non-defense scientists will be mobilized in a scientific-technical gold rush to come up with means of encoding and decoding human thought. Hence, the technical community is likely to come up with publicly available countermeasures to psychotronic weapons.
EXCELLENT REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Remote Behavioral Influence Technology (December 2003), a paper by John J. McMurtrey, a microbiologist, gives an excellent review of non-classified literature on the subject of electronic mind control. The current link is http://www.deepblacklies.co.
Included in the paper is a fascinating discussion on the use of advanced EEG analysis for reading of verbal thoughts.
In the immediate aftermath of publication of McMurtrey's paper, the Air Force limited internet access to a paper on non-lethal weaponry and a Pentagon contractor's page on long-range acoustic devices vanished. Since then, a great many links have vanished, and many of the more credible articles are not easily recovered.
One military weapon described in the Project Censored report linked above uses an electromagnetic pulse to shock the nervous system, inducing high-level pain in nerve endings and the sensation of hellish screams inside the head.
SOVIET MIND-WARP RESEARCH
The Soviet Union's vast germ war program reportedly included the study of bio-weapons for inducing mood alteration, according to the book "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War" (Simon and Schuster 2001) by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, all New York Times reporters.
The "Bonfire" program, conducted at the Biopreparat germ war center, focused on bio-weapons that manipulate peptides, the short chain of amino acids that send signals to the nervous system, the writers said.
Can you imagine the use of such a biological agent in tandem with, say, a device for making a person "hear voices" (described elsewhere on this site)?
This is reminiscent of the time in the 1970s when the Soviets bathed the U.S. embassy in powerful microwave radiation.
The U.S. Army's dislike of non-lethal weapons was noted by analyst Lt. Col. Timothy Thomas in Parameters, the Army War College quarterly, but he suggested that other armies would be interested in the clever use of cell phone technology as an intelligence weapon or in, for example, devices that can detect heartbeats through walls. The current form of the article says nothing about on the plausibility of psychotronic weapons that are either neurologically incapacitating or that introduce subliminal commands into a target's neuro-system. However, the use of neurological weapons such as tear-gas combined with high-tech potential is suggestive of such weaponry.
The unredacted version was published in 1999. http://
The best article on such weaponry appeared in the July 7, 1997 edition of U.S. News and World Report. Reporter Douglas Pasternak read a sheaf of research studies and interviewed scores of people for his article Wonder Weapons http://www.bibliotecapleyades.
Pasternak spoke to Eldon Byrd, who ran the Marine Corps Nonlethal Electromagnetic Weapons project from 1980 to 1983. His project was shut down and, he suspects, 'went black' after he discovered that he could trigger the release of behavior-altering chemicals in animal brains through bombardment with very low frequency electromagnetic radiation.
Large amounts of opioids were released in chick brains; he used low-power magnetic fields to release histamines in rat brains.
Secret research may well have shown how to release sleep-inducing chemicals in human brains in amounts liable to produce a trance-like state. Targets would then be vulnerable to psychological manipulation by hypnotic suggestion, perhaps in the form of a soft voice 'thrown' by an acoustic device, which makes a hearer perceive a sound as coming from point B when the device is at point A (in other words, an acutely engineered echo).
The December 2002 issue of Popular Science reports on inventor Woody Norris' hand-held speaker that projects sounds 'inside' a target's head. A highly focused high frequency inaudible sound wave cone cocoons an audible sound wave. The cocooned wave apparently splits into sub-waves so evenly balanced that the brain locates the source as 'inside the head' -- analagous to a good set of earphones, and, as with good earphones, people nearby hear nothing.
If a target is unaware of the existence of such devices and the volume is kept low, she or he might mistake spoken words for his or her own thoughts. That doesn't mean the target will turn into a zombie, but the potential for mischief is high, even without use of electronically induced opioids.
I suggest that U.S. covert forces have had devices similar to Norris' for no less than 15 years (as of 2002) but have kept quiet their existence.
'Mind-bending' technology was seemingly available by the mid-1980s, when the FBI was so severely compromised by the Soviets that it was effectively a cat'spaw for the KGB. So then, who would stop foreign agents from turning such weaponry on Americans they sought to discredit or otherwise harm?
The Webster report, issued in April 2002, portrays an internal security system only a mole could love. That slipshod security has been left that way for decades, despite repeated warnings.
Sounds like Los Alamos or the pre-Ames CIA. Yet, the report notes that the FBI paid no heed to security debacles at other federal intelligence units. Collectively, many red moles are thought to have slipped the net, the report says.
Treason is a far more common problem than is generally supposed, with the report citing Pentagon records of some 80 cases over the last decade of treasonous activity among employees of the federal government or of government contractors.
A useful web site devoted to preventing human rights abuses via psychotronic and other mind control techniques is run by Cheryl Welsh, who is well-regarded for her work. Her site, MindJustice, http://mindjustice.org/ ,contains much useful information.
In the past, her site contained a serious journalistic discussion of an apparent Soviet experiment broadcasting a psychotronic signal that might affect millions of people, perhaps tending to make them depressed or irritable.
The CIA's interest in manipulating human neurology first came to the attention of the American people via public exposes of the MKUltra program. Here is a relevant link: http://www.wired.com/
Dr. Jose Delgado was a neuroscientist once noted for his work on using electronic impulses to the brain in order to induce specific behaviors. A relevant backgrounder: http://www.wireheading.com/
Now suppose intelligence agents wished to affect human behavior without the subject realizing what was going on? Remote-controlled electrical impulses might be the answer.
It seems highly improbable that some outfit like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) or the CIA's technical division wasn't working on such devices, taking full advantage of the latest advances in nano-technology.
Let's not forget the sometimes powerful "strobe effect." In his book 'Sync' (Hyperion/Theia 2003), mathematician Steven Strogatz tells of hundreds of Japanese children who were sickened, some to the point of vomiting and even seizures, while watching a "Pokemon" episode on Dec. 16, 1997. Viewers were subjected to a bright white explosion followed by brilliant red, white and blue lights that flashed like a strobe, 12 times a second, for five seconds. One 14-year-old sitting less than three feet from his big-screen TV keeled over and was unconscious for more than half an hour.
Strogatz says the strobe pulses evidently triggered attacks of photosensitive epilepsy, a rare disorder that has become more common as television and video games have proliferated. The exact cause of the disorder is unknown but it is thought to result from brain waves being entrained (synchronized) by flickering light, causing brain neurons to misfire in lockstep.
Strogatz notes that that hypothesis is consistent with the observation that the most dangerous frequencies are between 15 and 20 cycles per second, just a bit faster than the brain's alpha rhythm.
Clearly, such a weapon would be unreliable as it would only affect some targets. However, one can be sure that various secret weapons agencies have looked into the strobe effect and have checked to see whether it can be fine-tuned to reach more people or to induce other than spasmodic reactions.
In May 2002, New Scientist published a report on 'robo-rats' controlled by three electrodes.' The university studywas sponsored by Darpa. The implication might be that Darpa is only now getting to rather primitive brain control technology. But, the agency may have desired to control the research while concealing from the researchers classified developments that might supersede their work.
As of May 9, 2002, New Scientist reported that the National Academy of Scientists had snatched from public view public records on nonlethal weapons projects it was studying. Among projects concealed retroactively were several that pointed to psychotronic capabilities, including a proposal to use an intense electromagnetic field to daze targets and make them lose control of voluntary body functions. The web address of the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Task Force has been disabled.
In the real world, no intelligence honcho is going to turn down the power of being able to disable an adversary silently and easily. Imagine having the ability to make a driver have a spasm while negotiating a dangerous turn. Of course, a sophisticated adversary has a surveillance signal detector, though it might not be enough of a countermeasure.
On the other hand, many persons, such as activists and journalists, have no such protections.
OF COURSE, there is no easy way to prove that such devices have been used against Americans. But, for years, we were told that the fears of red penetration of the CIA and the FBI were overblown. And then Ames and Hanssen were smoked out.
As the Hanssen matter demonstrates, the FBI was under heavy communist influence during its investigation of the TWA Flight 800 disaster. Among skeptics of the official line that the plane blew up accidentally Admiral Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Background:http://www.lohud.com/article/
The human tendency to assume that one is in control of one's actions greatly helps users of psychotronic and other behavior-influencing weaponry and techniques. A person who has been prompted to take a particular action, when asked why he did it, may give a list of credible reasons -- that he himself believes -- for his action, even though he was actually prodded by some unconscious stimulus. Hence, a victim will have a strong tendency to deny being manipulated. Such a lack of comprehension of one's true motives is a well-known psychological phenomenon, of course.
When a person says, 'I have decided to do X', what does that mean? The decision to enact X, in many if not all cases, HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE by the brain before that decision reaches consciousness. When a person says, 'I have decided...,' he is not so much deciding as listening to the brain's verbalization of its unconscious decision. In addition, he may give reasons for this decision which are not threatening to his sense of self but which are not the underlying cause. (On the other hand, it may be possible that the reasons he tells himself are fairly accurate verbalizations of the underlying causes.)
A very serious potential terrorist threat to America is the use of subliminal imagery on computer screens. As Thomas points out (in the unredacted version that is no longer available), research into such a weapon has stirred interest in Russia.
Suppose a fleeting image is inserted into computer work station programs, such that it appears 'every 25th screen' or some such number. If this image is designed to induce a fear response, the user may experience an increased sense of anxiety, depression or anger. If such a program pervaded the internet, millions might be victimized. And such attacks can be made to pervade the net through hacker programs similar to net viruses.
This form of subliminal influence works through a process known as backward masking (not the playing of recordings backward, which is something else again).
A quotation from 'Synaptic Self' (Viking 2002, page 208) by Joseph LeDoux, a New York University neuroscience professor:
'It's possible to present stimuli to the brain subliminally (unconsciously). This can be done in a number of different ways, but one commonly used is backwards masking. In this procedure, an emotionally arousing visual stimulus is flashed on a screen very briefly (for a few milliseconds) and is then followed immediately by some neutral stimulus that stays on the screen for several seconds. The second stimulus blanks out the first, preventing it from entering conscious awareness (by preventing it from entering working memory), but it does not prevent the first from eliciting an emotional reaction (the stimulus still changes the beating of the heart or makes the palms sweat). Since the stimulus never reaches awareness (because it is blocked from working memory), the responses must be based on the unconscious processing of the meaning of the stimulus rather than on the conscious experience of it. By short-circuiting the stages necessary for the stimulus to reach consciousness, the masking procedure reveals processes that go on outside of consciousness in the human brain.'
Antiviral antidotes to such a widescale attack might work locally for short periods but could have the unpleasant effect of actually strengthening the overall mass attack.
Consider the process of behavioral extinction. The more a single image is presented subliminally (or consciously), the less of a response from the brain -- provided that no rewards or punishments accompany presentation of the stimulus. However, it is also likely that in many cases, overuse of such a technique will result in extinction. That is, the brain will tend to give up responding to any subliminal image presented on a screen.
However, antiviral antidotes will tend to decrease general resistance in the computer-using population to such subliminal attacks. That is, if a subliminal attack, including one that changes images, targets a particular user without interruption for a sufficient time, the brain is likely to build up immunity. But if the user is hit by a series of shorter attacks that occur at irregular intervals, the brain may get little chance to build up immunity. Hence wide use of countermeasures would actually tend to increase the effectiveness of the attacks.
On the other hand, the attack programs can be instructed to shut off the subliminal imagery and turn it back on again at specified intervals. In that case, the best policy might be to vaccinate the computer-using public with a steady stream of subliminal imagery, though the risks for particular users might be unacceptable.
Obviously, subliminal influence need not come as a mass attack by Saddam Hussein's henchmen. A lone computer terminal user might be targeted for such an attack by a powerful force, such as an intelligence operation.
Also, though computer and TV screens are convenient avenues for subliminal influence, other possibilities exist.
And it is difficult to assess the level of manipulation possible via this type of subliminal influence, though it is a safe assumption that the CIA's technical division has studied this subject to the nth degree.
Another well-documented article is found here: http://www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg
Also see: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BAB408B.html
***Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists has pointed out that the term 'psychotronic weaponry' first surfaced in a military paper concerning combat via paranormal powers, something toward which the scientific community is largely unsympathetic. However, the term has evolved to imply the concept of covertly altered behavior. Sometimes the term 'nonlethal weapons' is used, but that term, which includes such things as stun guns, tends to confuse the issue.
*An embarrassing error crept into an earlier version of this page, where the congressman's name was incorrectly given as Deconcini. See Psyops against the press for more on 'inadvertent' errors. I don't claim that I never err, only that there are forces only too happy to sandbag a pesky journalist.
Psychotronic mind games
A paper of crucial importance is Remote Behavioral Influence Technology by John J. McMurtrey, a microbiologist, who gives an excellent review of non-classified literature on the subject of electronic mind control. The current link is http://www.deepblacklies.co.Nearly all links on my essay have gone the way of all entropy since this piece first appeared in 2002. This version of August 2013 has not kept pace with the breath-taking revolution in electronic-mind interfaces over the past decade, but updates links as well as possible and makes a few minor editorial changes.
Another important link: Human auditory system response to modulated electromagnetic energy by Allan H. Frey, General Electric Advanced Electronics Center, Cornell University http://www.raven1.net/frey.htm
If a link fails, try pasting it into the browser bar.
By PAUL CONANT
People with reputations to safeguard dodge the subject of psychotronic weapons as if it were as far beyond the pale of responsible journalistic and scientific discourse as is the subject of UFOs. Ergo, psychotronic weaponry is a delusion.***
Never mind that there was a bill in Congress that would ban space-based psychotronic weapons (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/
DUTCH REPORT PSYCHOTRONIC EFFECTS
Kucinich wasn't so kooky after all. An October 2003 report supported by the Dutch Economics Ministry found that radio waves covering a mobile phone district affect cognitive functions, boosting memory and response times among people close enough to the transmitter. The study, done by TNO, found that the radio waves broadcast to current second-generation European phones and those waves to be used for third-generation phones --which have rapid data-transfer capabilities-- both affected cognitive functions. The study also found that third-generation signals had a significant impact, including tingling sensations, nausea and headaches. See http://www.emrpolicy.org/news/
A good rundown on the cell phone health issue is found at http://www.rare-leadership.
DARPA'S MIND-BOGGLING PLAN
A monkey just thinks, a system of electrodes detects the thought, and, voila!, a robot-arm moves, Darpa-funded researchers at Duke and MIT announced in October 2003.
Actually, Anthony J. Tether, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, unveiled the breakthrough in a little-noticed speech last year. Darpa was rushing pell-mell to develop a thought-controlled robot warrior, he said. 'Imagine a warrior with the intellect of a human and the immortality of a machine controlled by our thoughts,' Tether said. 'The genie is out of the bottle on this possibility' of thought-guided weapons, he said.
'The nation that first gains this possibility will dominate.'
The thought-control device works by detecting a specific pattern of electrical activity in the brain and translating that into a signal to the robot's motor system.
In other words, the scientists have discovered that patterns of electrical activity can be identified as thoughts or intentions.
Tether did not announce, but we may take for granted, that Darpa will also focus on means of stimulating electrical patterns in the brain that replicate thoughts. The idea would be for the target to mistake the imputed thoughts for his own.
In fact, as this essay shows, it is highly probable that the CIA, the Pentagon and defense contractors have been long hard at work on covert behavior manipulation via electronic means.
However, what is likely to be developed here is the fine-tuning of mental manipulation capabilities. Instead of being able to simply impute some emotional reaction, such as fear or anger, by electronic means, the possibility arises of false thought-intentions such as 'I want to leave the room' being directly imputed.
No doubt military researchers, prompted by the revolution in MRI imaging, will catalogue electrical patterns from many persons in order to identify patterns common to many. Possibly, someone sitting at a Darpa computer could type in the thoughts he wants a target to have and the computer could use a set of signals to broadcast to the target's brain.
A partial antidote to such machinations is that now non-defense scientists will be mobilized in a scientific-technical gold rush to come up with means of encoding and decoding human thought. Hence, the technical community is likely to come up with publicly available countermeasures to psychotronic weapons.
EXCELLENT REVIEW OF LITERATURE
Remote Behavioral Influence Technology (December 2003), a paper by John J. McMurtrey, a microbiologist, gives an excellent review of non-classified literature on the subject of electronic mind control. The current link is http://www.deepblacklies.co.
Included in the paper is a fascinating discussion on the use of advanced EEG analysis for reading of verbal thoughts.
In the immediate aftermath of publication of McMurtrey's paper, the Air Force limited internet access to a paper on non-lethal weaponry and a Pentagon contractor's page on long-range acoustic devices vanished. Since then, a great many links have vanished, and many of the more credible articles are not easily recovered.
One military weapon described in the Project Censored report linked above uses an electromagnetic pulse to shock the nervous system, inducing high-level pain in nerve endings and the sensation of hellish screams inside the head.
SOVIET MIND-WARP RESEARCH
The Soviet Union's vast germ war program reportedly included the study of bio-weapons for inducing mood alteration, according to the book "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War" (Simon and Schuster 2001) by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, all New York Times reporters.
The "Bonfire" program, conducted at the Biopreparat germ war center, focused on bio-weapons that manipulate peptides, the short chain of amino acids that send signals to the nervous system, the writers said.
Can you imagine the use of such a biological agent in tandem with, say, a device for making a person "hear voices" (described elsewhere on this site)?
This is reminiscent of the time in the 1970s when the Soviets bathed the U.S. embassy in powerful microwave radiation.
The U.S. Army's dislike of non-lethal weapons was noted by analyst Lt. Col. Timothy Thomas in Parameters, the Army War College quarterly, but he suggested that other armies would be interested in the clever use of cell phone technology as an intelligence weapon or in, for example, devices that can detect heartbeats through walls. The current form of the article says nothing about on the plausibility of psychotronic weapons that are either neurologically incapacitating or that introduce subliminal commands into a target's neuro-system. However, the use of neurological weapons such as tear-gas combined with high-tech potential is suggestive of such weaponry.
The unredacted version was published in 1999. http://
The best article on such weaponry appeared in the July 7, 1997 edition of U.S. News and World Report. Reporter Douglas Pasternak read a sheaf of research studies and interviewed scores of people for his article Wonder Weapons http://www.bibliotecapleyades.
Pasternak spoke to Eldon Byrd, who ran the Marine Corps Nonlethal Electromagnetic Weapons project from 1980 to 1983. His project was shut down and, he suspects, 'went black' after he discovered that he could trigger the release of behavior-altering chemicals in animal brains through bombardment with very low frequency electromagnetic radiation.
Large amounts of opioids were released in chick brains; he used low-power magnetic fields to release histamines in rat brains.
Secret research may well have shown how to release sleep-inducing chemicals in human brains in amounts liable to produce a trance-like state. Targets would then be vulnerable to psychological manipulation by hypnotic suggestion, perhaps in the form of a soft voice 'thrown' by an acoustic device, which makes a hearer perceive a sound as coming from point B when the device is at point A (in other words, an acutely engineered echo).
The December 2002 issue of Popular Science reports on inventor Woody Norris' hand-held speaker that projects sounds 'inside' a target's head. A highly focused high frequency inaudible sound wave cone cocoons an audible sound wave. The cocooned wave apparently splits into sub-waves so evenly balanced that the brain locates the source as 'inside the head' -- analagous to a good set of earphones, and, as with good earphones, people nearby hear nothing.
If a target is unaware of the existence of such devices and the volume is kept low, she or he might mistake spoken words for his or her own thoughts. That doesn't mean the target will turn into a zombie, but the potential for mischief is high, even without use of electronically induced opioids.
I suggest that U.S. covert forces have had devices similar to Norris' for no less than 15 years (as of 2002) but have kept quiet their existence.
'Mind-bending' technology was seemingly available by the mid-1980s, when the FBI was so severely compromised by the Soviets that it was effectively a cat'spaw for the KGB. So then, who would stop foreign agents from turning such weaponry on Americans they sought to discredit or otherwise harm?
The Webster report, issued in April 2002, portrays an internal security system only a mole could love. That slipshod security has been left that way for decades, despite repeated warnings.
Sounds like Los Alamos or the pre-Ames CIA. Yet, the report notes that the FBI paid no heed to security debacles at other federal intelligence units. Collectively, many red moles are thought to have slipped the net, the report says.
Treason is a far more common problem than is generally supposed, with the report citing Pentagon records of some 80 cases over the last decade of treasonous activity among employees of the federal government or of government contractors.
A useful web site devoted to preventing human rights abuses via psychotronic and other mind control techniques is run by Cheryl Welsh, who is well-regarded for her work. Her site, MindJustice, http://mindjustice.org/ ,contains much useful information.
In the past, her site contained a serious journalistic discussion of an apparent Soviet experiment broadcasting a psychotronic signal that might affect millions of people, perhaps tending to make them depressed or irritable.
The CIA's interest in manipulating human neurology first came to the attention of the American people via public exposes of the MKUltra program. Here is a relevant link: http://www.wired.com/
Dr. Jose Delgado was a neuroscientist once noted for his work on using electronic impulses to the brain in order to induce specific behaviors. A relevant backgrounder: http://www.wireheading.com/
Now suppose intelligence agents wished to affect human behavior without the subject realizing what was going on? Remote-controlled electrical impulses might be the answer.
It seems highly improbable that some outfit like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) or the CIA's technical division wasn't working on such devices, taking full advantage of the latest advances in nano-technology.
Let's not forget the sometimes powerful "strobe effect." In his book 'Sync' (Hyperion/Theia 2003), mathematician Steven Strogatz tells of hundreds of Japanese children who were sickened, some to the point of vomiting and even seizures, while watching a "Pokemon" episode on Dec. 16, 1997. Viewers were subjected to a bright white explosion followed by brilliant red, white and blue lights that flashed like a strobe, 12 times a second, for five seconds. One 14-year-old sitting less than three feet from his big-screen TV keeled over and was unconscious for more than half an hour.
Strogatz says the strobe pulses evidently triggered attacks of photosensitive epilepsy, a rare disorder that has become more common as television and video games have proliferated. The exact cause of the disorder is unknown but it is thought to result from brain waves being entrained (synchronized) by flickering light, causing brain neurons to misfire in lockstep.
Strogatz notes that that hypothesis is consistent with the observation that the most dangerous frequencies are between 15 and 20 cycles per second, just a bit faster than the brain's alpha rhythm.
Clearly, such a weapon would be unreliable as it would only affect some targets. However, one can be sure that various secret weapons agencies have looked into the strobe effect and have checked to see whether it can be fine-tuned to reach more people or to induce other than spasmodic reactions.
In May 2002, New Scientist published a report on 'robo-rats' controlled by three electrodes.' The university studywas sponsored by Darpa. The implication might be that Darpa is only now getting to rather primitive brain control technology. But, the agency may have desired to control the research while concealing from the researchers classified developments that might supersede their work.
As of May 9, 2002, New Scientist reported that the National Academy of Scientists had snatched from public view public records on nonlethal weapons projects it was studying. Among projects concealed retroactively were several that pointed to psychotronic capabilities, including a proposal to use an intense electromagnetic field to daze targets and make them lose control of voluntary body functions. The web address of the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Task Force has been disabled.
In the real world, no intelligence honcho is going to turn down the power of being able to disable an adversary silently and easily. Imagine having the ability to make a driver have a spasm while negotiating a dangerous turn. Of course, a sophisticated adversary has a surveillance signal detector, though it might not be enough of a countermeasure.
On the other hand, many persons, such as activists and journalists, have no such protections.
OF COURSE, there is no easy way to prove that such devices have been used against Americans. But, for years, we were told that the fears of red penetration of the CIA and the FBI were overblown. And then Ames and Hanssen were smoked out.
As the Hanssen matter demonstrates, the FBI was under heavy communist influence during its investigation of the TWA Flight 800 disaster. Among skeptics of the official line that the plane blew up accidentally Admiral Thomas Moorer, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Background:http://www.lohud.com/article/
The human tendency to assume that one is in control of one's actions greatly helps users of psychotronic and other behavior-influencing weaponry and techniques. A person who has been prompted to take a particular action, when asked why he did it, may give a list of credible reasons -- that he himself believes -- for his action, even though he was actually prodded by some unconscious stimulus. Hence, a victim will have a strong tendency to deny being manipulated. Such a lack of comprehension of one's true motives is a well-known psychological phenomenon, of course.
When a person says, 'I have decided to do X', what does that mean? The decision to enact X, in many if not all cases, HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE by the brain before that decision reaches consciousness. When a person says, 'I have decided...,' he is not so much deciding as listening to the brain's verbalization of its unconscious decision. In addition, he may give reasons for this decision which are not threatening to his sense of self but which are not the underlying cause. (On the other hand, it may be possible that the reasons he tells himself are fairly accurate verbalizations of the underlying causes.)
A very serious potential terrorist threat to America is the use of subliminal imagery on computer screens. As Thomas points out (in the unredacted version that is no longer available), research into such a weapon has stirred interest in Russia.
Suppose a fleeting image is inserted into computer work station programs, such that it appears 'every 25th screen' or some such number. If this image is designed to induce a fear response, the user may experience an increased sense of anxiety, depression or anger. If such a program pervaded the internet, millions might be victimized. And such attacks can be made to pervade the net through hacker programs similar to net viruses.
This form of subliminal influence works through a process known as backward masking (not the playing of recordings backward, which is something else again).
A quotation from 'Synaptic Self' (Viking 2002, page 208) by Joseph LeDoux, a New York University neuroscience professor:
'It's possible to present stimuli to the brain subliminally (unconsciously). This can be done in a number of different ways, but one commonly used is backwards masking. In this procedure, an emotionally arousing visual stimulus is flashed on a screen very briefly (for a few milliseconds) and is then followed immediately by some neutral stimulus that stays on the screen for several seconds. The second stimulus blanks out the first, preventing it from entering conscious awareness (by preventing it from entering working memory), but it does not prevent the first from eliciting an emotional reaction (the stimulus still changes the beating of the heart or makes the palms sweat). Since the stimulus never reaches awareness (because it is blocked from working memory), the responses must be based on the unconscious processing of the meaning of the stimulus rather than on the conscious experience of it. By short-circuiting the stages necessary for the stimulus to reach consciousness, the masking procedure reveals processes that go on outside of consciousness in the human brain.'
Antiviral antidotes to such a widescale attack might work locally for short periods but could have the unpleasant effect of actually strengthening the overall mass attack.
Consider the process of behavioral extinction. The more a single image is presented subliminally (or consciously), the less of a response from the brain -- provided that no rewards or punishments accompany presentation of the stimulus. However, it is also likely that in many cases, overuse of such a technique will result in extinction. That is, the brain will tend to give up responding to any subliminal image presented on a screen.
However, antiviral antidotes will tend to decrease general resistance in the computer-using population to such subliminal attacks. That is, if a subliminal attack, including one that changes images, targets a particular user without interruption for a sufficient time, the brain is likely to build up immunity. But if the user is hit by a series of shorter attacks that occur at irregular intervals, the brain may get little chance to build up immunity. Hence wide use of countermeasures would actually tend to increase the effectiveness of the attacks.
On the other hand, the attack programs can be instructed to shut off the subliminal imagery and turn it back on again at specified intervals. In that case, the best policy might be to vaccinate the computer-using public with a steady stream of subliminal imagery, though the risks for particular users might be unacceptable.
Obviously, subliminal influence need not come as a mass attack by Saddam Hussein's henchmen. A lone computer terminal user might be targeted for such an attack by a powerful force, such as an intelligence operation.
Also, though computer and TV screens are convenient avenues for subliminal influence, other possibilities exist.
And it is difficult to assess the level of manipulation possible via this type of subliminal influence, though it is a safe assumption that the CIA's technical division has studied this subject to the nth degree.
Comments on Wikipedia piece on psychotronics
Excerpt:
In the US, there are a growing number of people who hear voices in their heads that claim the government is using "psychotronic torture" against them, and who campaign to stop the use of alleged psychotronic and other mind control weapons.[7][8] These campaigns have received some support from government representatives including Dennis Kucinich[7]and Jim Guest.[8] Yale psychiatry professor Ralph Hoffman notes that people often ascribe voices in their heads to external sources such as government harassment, God, and dead relatives, and it can be difficult to persuade them that their belief in an external influence is delusional.[7] Other experts compare these stories with accounts of alien abductions.[8]
Translation: Because there are mentally ill people, it follows that governments don't develop such weaponry and so you can trust the Pentagon.
Excerpt:
Excerpt:
In the US, there are a growing number of people who hear voices in their heads that claim the government is using "psychotronic torture" against them, and who campaign to stop the use of alleged psychotronic and other mind control weapons.[7][8] These campaigns have received some support from government representatives including Dennis Kucinich[7]and Jim Guest.[8] Yale psychiatry professor Ralph Hoffman notes that people often ascribe voices in their heads to external sources such as government harassment, God, and dead relatives, and it can be difficult to persuade them that their belief in an external influence is delusional.[7] Other experts compare these stories with accounts of alien abductions.[8]
Translation: Because there are mentally ill people, it follows that governments don't develop such weaponry and so you can trust the Pentagon.
Excerpt:
The campaign groups use news stories, military journals and declassified national security documents to support their allegations that governments are developing weapons intended to send voices into people's heads.[7] For example, psychotronic weapons were reportedly being studied by the Russian Federation during the 1990s[9][10] with military analyst Lieutenant Colonel Timothy L. Thomas saying in 1998 that there was a strong belief in Russia that weapons for attacking the mind of a soldier were a possibility, although no working devices were reported.[10]
Comments:
* "The campaign groups" are raising the issue of the ethics of covert use of such devices on unwitting members of the public.
* The well-documented Wikipedia article accuses writers on psychotronic weaponry of documenting their articles.
* Thomas's remarks on psychotronics have been deleted from public view by the Pentagon.
* Quite a few neuroscientists and psychologists have been aware of the potential for such weaponry.
* A few years ago a techie developed software that tracked the source of those who wrote and edited Wikipedia articles. Articles of interest to CIA employees were altered from terminals at the CIA, he found.
Comments:
* "The campaign groups" are raising the issue of the ethics of covert use of such devices on unwitting members of the public.
* The well-documented Wikipedia article accuses writers on psychotronic weaponry of documenting their articles.
* Thomas's remarks on psychotronics have been deleted from public view by the Pentagon.
* Quite a few neuroscientists and psychologists have been aware of the potential for such weaponry.
* A few years ago a techie developed software that tracked the source of those who wrote and edited Wikipedia articles. Articles of interest to CIA employees were altered from terminals at the CIA, he found.
Another well-documented article is found here: http://www.wanttoknow.info/bluebird10pg
Also see: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BAB408B.html
***Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists has pointed out that the term 'psychotronic weaponry' first surfaced in a military paper concerning combat via paranormal powers, something toward which the scientific community is largely unsympathetic. However, the term has evolved to imply the concept of covertly altered behavior. Sometimes the term 'nonlethal weapons' is used, but that term, which includes such things as stun guns, tends to confuse the issue.
*An embarrassing error crept into an earlier version of this page, where the congressman's name was incorrectly given as Deconcini. See Psyops against the press for more on 'inadvertent' errors. I don't claim that I never err, only that there are forces only too happy to sandbag a pesky journalist.
Sunday, August 4, 2013
Notes from Cyberia
Is NSA monitoring
Is NSA monitoring
visitors to its site?
Four attempts to visit the NSA's public website at NSA.gov via a privacy protection service failed this evening.
I entered the NSA's URL into the proxy service HideMyAss, which returned the message: "The requested resource could not be loaded."
However, proxy viewing was successful on first attempt for the public sites of the White House, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA and Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat.
It appears that the NSA may have blocked proxy viewing so that it can track and identify all visitors to its public site.
I entered the NSA's URL into the proxy service HideMyAss, which returned the message: "The requested resource could not be loaded."
However, proxy viewing was successful on first attempt for the public sites of the White House, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA and Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat.
It appears that the NSA may have blocked proxy viewing so that it can track and identify all visitors to its public site.
Privacy app fails for blogspot
HideMyAss is a proxy service that acts as a middleman for your internet activity, making it very hard if not impossible for the sites you visit to track you.
The company offers a free service as a promotion for its "professional" service costing about $60 a year. So one can imagine that the free service won't always work well. For example, HideMyAss says its free service works for Youtube. However, someone, perhaps Google, disables the videos once you reach Youtube via proxy.
But, it's hard to imagine the reasoning that causes HideMyAss to forbid going to certain Blogger sites, such as my blog Newz from Limbo, while permitting others Blogger sites.
If I go to a blog powered by Blogger, but that lacks the word "blogspot" in the URL, the proxy takes me there. But if the word "blogspot" is part of the URL, the proxy returns this message: "Sorry this proxy does not allow the requested site... to be viewed."
So one is left to wonder whether the barring of easy proxy viewing of blogspot blogs is a simple commercial decision to encourage use of the paid service or whether this stems from federal counterterrorism unit's concerns that encrypted viewing of such blogs will interfere with the monitoring of those blogs considered to be conduits to terrorists.
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