rigorousintuition.ca

cptmarginal wrote:Very interesting article... Don't think I've heard of the "Games Center" before, though of course it's pretty obvious that something of that sort existed.

The "Game" he refers to is a management game-playing exercise the CIA did in the 1950s when planning the interventions. It's aim was to predict how all the "players" in the country would behave.

It's one hell of a journey going back and rereading his articles ever since Curtis got the BBC to allow international access to his embedded archival videos.

This is one my favorite of his articles in which the videos are an essential part:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2 ... art_9.html

"A general social systems model which will make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing country - by understanding the sociological and anthropological characteristics of the people involved in the war."

In 2005 Montgomey McFate saw these ideas as the model for what anthropology could do for American foreign policy in a war zone.

And that is what she re-created in the Human Terrain System.

Here is part of a film the Pentagon made in 1968 which explains how this universal model of psychological manipulation can be applied. It is set in a fictional country called Hostland. The film implies that it is a Latin American country - because at that time the US military were worried by Chile. But everything in it can equally apply to the American fears about Afghanistan today.

NSA Lawyer Questioned Over Cellphone Location Tracking of Americans.
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / July 26, 2011, 11:35 AM ET.

Is the government using cellular data to track Americans as they move around the U.S.?

According to the general counsel of the National Security Agency, it may have that authority. Matthew Olsen, who is currently at the NSA and has been nominated to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, discussed the possibility at a confirmation hearing Tuesday morning in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist,” he said. His comments came after Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) asked him several times whether the government has the authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.”

Although Olsen acknowledged the possibility, he also said “it is a very complicated question” and that the intelligence community is working on a memo that will provide a better answer for the committee.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, asked that such a memo be prepared in time for the committee’s first hearing in September, after the August recess.

The questions come after Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall (D., Colo.) wrote a letter to the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asking whether the agencies he leads, including the NSA and the CIA, “have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes.”



http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/26/ ... _news_blog

elfismiles wrote:

NSA Lawyer Questioned Over Cellphone Location Tracking of Americans.
By Jennifer Valentino-DeVries / July 26, 2011, 11:35 AM ET.

Is the government using cellular data to track Americans as they move around the U.S.?

According to the general counsel of the National Security Agency, it may have that authority. Matthew Olsen, who is currently at the NSA and has been nominated to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, discussed the possibility at a confirmation hearing Tuesday morning in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist,” he said. His comments came after Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) asked him several times whether the government has the authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.”

Although Olsen acknowledged the possibility, he also said “it is a very complicated question” and that the intelligence community is working on a memo that will provide a better answer for the committee.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, asked that such a memo be prepared in time for the committee’s first hearing in September, after the August recess.

The questions come after Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall (D., Colo.) wrote a letter to the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asking whether the agencies he leads, including the NSA and the CIA, “have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes.”



http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/07/26/ ... _news_blog

The IBM Teraflop SP System, also know as the UITS Research SP, is comprised of two physical IBM RS/6000 SP systems connected to form one logical system which will have a total theoretical peak compute capacity of 1.005 TeraFLOPS (1.005 trillion FLoating OPerations per Second), a total memory capacity of 452 gigabytes (452 billion bytes), and a total disk capacity of 5.3 terabytes (5.3 trillion bytes). The currently installed ten SP frames hold a total of 616 processors within 143 SP nodes. These nodes are interconnected via two low-latency high-speed (150 megabytes/second) networks using crossbar switch technology, referred to as the SP Switch. An SP Switch router, specially designed to support SP Switch adapter cards, links the two networks. The two SP systems which comprise the IBM Teraflop SP System are referred to as the Aries Complex and the Orion Complex.

The Aries Complex includes eight frames of 4-cpu Power3+ Thin nodes, providing a homogeneous parallel processing environment for 508 processors with a total of 453 gigabytes of distributed memory.

The Orion Complex houses two frames: one frame of 4-cpu Power3+ Thin nodes, and another frame of 16-cpu Power3+ High nodes. With 8 gigabytes of memory, these Power3+ High nodes provide an excellent symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) environment for large-memory parallel jobs. Indiana University will add yet this fall another powerful SMP system, a 16-cpu Power4 Regatta node, to the Orion Complex. The Regatta incorporates IBM's newest processor and node technology, designed to provide excellent performance for both scientific and commercial/database workloads. (Further information about Power4 and Regatta technology is available at http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pser ... s/2001/oct). The Orion Complex is currently located with the Aries Complex in Bloomington, but will be relocated to Indianapolis in the near future to better support researchers at the School of Medicine.

Within the IBM TeraFLOP SP, each node runs its own copy of the IBM's Unix operating system, AIX, but system managment of this large cluster is integrated and facilitated via IBM's SP management software, PSSP (Parallel System Support Program). The entire system is accessed via a single batch scheduler, IBM's LoadLeveler package, such that a user may log in to any of the SP nodes and submit a batch job, and this job is then dispatched to a suitable node with the required hardware, software and available cycles to run the job. While a large majority of the cycles consumed on the IBM Teraflop SP are used by parallel programs (i.e., programs which run simultaneously on several processors), there is also a significant amount of serial (i.e., single-cpu) work performed on this system. A wealth of software is available, including several commercial statistical and mathematical packages, scientific/numerical libraries, and database applications.

Of benefit to all users but especially to parallel programmers is a high-performance parallel filesystem, IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System), which supports the reading and writing of data simultaneously to and from several nodes across several disks, but which also supports the usual Unix file system commands. The Aries Complex access a 570 gigabyte GPFS filesystem, while a 144 gigabyte GPFS filesystem is accessible to the nodes of the Orion Complex. In addition, the Teraflop SP is connected via the SP Switch router to the mass store system, another IBM RS/6000 SP system which runs the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) for fast archival and retrieval of large amounts of data to and from disk cache and tape.

This tutorial provides an overview of IBM POWER hardware and software components with a practical emphasis on how to develop and run parallel programs on IBM POWER systems. It does not attempt to cover the entire range of IBM POWER products, however. Instead, it focuses on the types of IBM POWER machines and their environment as implemented by Livermore Computing (LC).

From the point of historical interest, the tutorial begins by providing a succinct history of IBM's POWER architectures. Each of the major hardware components of a parallel POWER system are then discussed in detail, including processor architectures, frames, nodes and the internal high-speed switch network. A description of each of LC's IBM POWER systems follows.

The remainder, and majority, of the tutorial then progresses through "how to use" an IBM POWER system for parallel programming, with an emphasis on IBM's Parallel Operating Environment (POE) software. POE provides the facilities for developing and running parallel Fortran, C/C++ programs on parallel POWER systems. POE components are explained and their usage is demonstrated. The tutorial concludes with a brief discussion of LC specifics and mention of several miscellaneous POE components/tools. A lab exercise follows the presentation.

Level/Prerequisites: Intended for those who are new to developing parallel programs in the IBM POWER environment. A basic understanding of parallel programming in C or Fortran is assumed. The material covered by EC3501 - Introduction to Livermore Computing Resources would also be useful.

Researchers Plan to Simulate Movements of 300 Million Americans
by Lisa Zyga, Technology / Computer Sciences

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers from Virginia Tech are developing a computer simulation that matches the movements of all 300 million people in towns across the US. The team hopes that the model will help them understand the spread of contagious diseases, fads, and traffic flows.

Currently, the researchers' model consists of about 100 million Americans, and they expect to be able to simulate the movement of all 300 million US residents in the next six months. To achieve this, the researchers use large amounts of publicly available demographic data, mostly from the US Census. Each synthetic American possesses as many as 163 variables, which describe characteristics such as age, education level, occupation, and whether one lives with a family or alone.

The software, called EpiSimdemics, can provide an accurate simulation of the demographic attributes of groups composed of 1500 people or more. Based on the data, the software generates individuals to populate real US cities, giving them real street addresses and real jobs or schools within a reasonable distance from their address. Individuals are also matched to local grocery stores and shopping centers, which are identified through a database from Navteq, a digital mapping company.

One of the first applications for compiling all this data will be studying how contagious diseases, such as a flu epidemic, might spread through different regions. The software infects a few simulated individuals with the flu, and tracks them as they go about their daily lives. The model gives each person a different probability of responding to the virus, derived from the individual's data, such as age and general health.

Using data from all the interactions between infected individuals and others, the algorithm determines the number of new infections. The software treats each person and location as a separate set of calculations, so that many parts can be computed in parallel on a supercomputer. By breaking up the problem in this way, the researchers could significantly speed up the calculations.

By showing the path that a virus takes through a population, the simulation can help researchers implement effective public health intervention programs. The simulation can also determine when the infection peaks, representing the biggest burden on a city's health system, and preparing officials.

"The vision is for a Google-like interface, where you approach the system and ask it a question," says Christopher Barrett, who works on the project and is the director of Virginia Tech's Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory. "The framework is there, and now we're pushing the system to larger and larger scales."

What happens when you take military war-gaming technology, inject it with the latest discoveries in management, economics, and psychology, and apply it to business, political, and social situations? The answer is Simulex’s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), the result of ten years of research conducted at Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, in association with the United States Department of Defense and several Fortune 500 companies.

What We Do

At Simulex, Inc., we use our exclusive license to SEAS to provide the next generation of consulting services to our clients in government and the private sector. Instead of experimenting with real people, SEAS allows clients to interact with synthetic people and observe what is happenin Using agent-based modeling in a business war-gaming environment, SEAS seamlessly incorporates all aspects of managerial decision making to provide a complete and integrated view of economies, industries, and organizations.

Our Goal

Our ultimate goal is to provide a totally customized product that will allow an organization to perform detailed exploration of the key issues it faces and create defined strategies that will shape its future.

On a hot summer day in Iraq, U.S. soldiers fight a low-intensity counterinsurgency battle on the streets of Baghdad. At 10 a.m., a truck parks near a warehouse in a crowded part of town. The truck explodes, killing the men inside and one of the soldiers standing guard.

After securing the area, the remaining soldiers sound the alarm and call for help. Onlookers gather — some cursing the bombers and others cursing the Americans for attracting the attack. Eventually, emergency responders arrive and begin to treat the wounded and quell the mob. If it had occurred in the real world, this scenario generated in a Defense Department simulation would have immediate and future repercussions in the neighborhood, the country and the Middle East.

DOD creates hundreds of similar scenarios in the largest modeling and simulation environment that the department has ever built. DOD uses the simulated environment for a set of experiments, known as Urban Resolve 2015. Those experiments are redefining the way the military operates in urban environments. Urban Resolve is also changing the way DOD develops concepts, procures technology and conducts training.

The Joint Forces Command’s experimentation directorate often brings new concepts into JFCOM training centers to benefit soon-to-be-deployed solders, said Dave Ozolek, executive director of DOD’s Joint Urban Operations Office and executive director of the Joint Futures Laboratory at JFCOM. “What you’re seeing is a glimpse of the future.”

Urban Resolve is the most important and complex experiment conducted since Millennium Challenge 2002, Ozolek said. The 2002 experiment took three years to plan and cost about $250 million. DOD developed Urban Resolve in half the time and spent about $22 million.

The Vernon Smith Experimental Economics Laboratory (VSEEL) is a state-of-the-art facility for laboratory data collection for economics, management, and other social sciences.

UR2015 is the second of three experimentation
spirals intended to investigate warfighting issues in an urban
environment. Spiral I, conducted from late FY03 to early
FY05, focused on developing situational understanding.
Spiral II (UR2015), which began in FY05 and ends in
early FY07, focuses on isolating an irregular adversary
and controlling a large urban environment. Spiral III,
scheduled for the FY06 - 08 timeframe, will focus on seizing
the initiative and controlling the operational tempo

Abstract
This paper presents a laboratory collective resistance (CR) game to study how different forms of non-binding communication among subordinates can help coordinate their collective resistance against a leader who transgresses against their rights. Contrary to the predictions of analysis based on purely self-regarding preferences, we find that non-binding communication about intended resistance increases the incidence of no transgression even in the one-shot laboratory CR game. In particular, we find that the incidence of no transgression increases from 7 percent with no communication to 16-37 percent depending on whether communication occurs before or after the leader's transgression decision. Subordinates' messages are different when the leaders can observe them, and the leaders also appear to use the observed messages to target specific subordinates for transgression.

August 2001: RecruitSIM: Conducted Strategic Planning Wargame for the Commanding General of US Army Recruiting Command and his Brigade Commanders at Fort Knox, Ky. During this exercise the brigade commanders investigated different recruiting strategies to meet the challenges that they will face in the future when the army transformation process in implemented.

The Next NSA Spying Shoe to Drop: “Pre-Crime” Artificial Intelligence
Posted on June 16, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog


NSA Building Big Brother “Pre-Crime” Artificial Intelligence Program

NSA spying whistleblower Edward Snowden’s statements have been verified.Reporter Glenn Greenwald has promised numerous additional disclosures from Snowden.

What other revelations are coming?

We reported in 2008:

A new article by investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham reveals, a governmental unit operating in secret and with no oversight whatsoever is gathering massive amounts of data on every American and running artificial intelligence software to predict each American’s behavior, including “what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help”.

The same governmental unit is responsible for suspending the Constitution and implementing martial law in the event that anything is deemed by the White House in its sole discretion to constitute a threat to the United States. (this is formally known as implementing “Continuity of Government” plans). [Background here.]

As Ketcham’s article makes clear, these same folks and their predecessors have been been busy dreaming up plans to imprison countless “trouble-making” Americans without trial in case of any real or imagined emergency.What kind of Americans? Ketcham describes it this way:

“Dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.”

Do we want the same small group of folks who have the power to suspend the Constitution, implement martial law, and imprison normal citizens to also be gathering information on all Americans and running AI programs to be able to predict where American citizens will go for help and what they will do in case of an emergency? Don’t we want the government to — um, I don’t know — help us in case of an emergency?

Bear in mind that the Pentagon is also running an AI program to see how people will react to propaganda and to government-inflicted terror. The program is called Sentient World Simulation:

“U.S defense, intel and homeland security officials are constructing a parallel world, on a computer, which the agencies will use to test propaganda messages and military strategies.Called the Sentient World Simulation, the program uses AI routines based upon the psychological theories of Marty Seligman, among others. (Seligman introduced the theory of ‘learned helplessness’ in the 1960s, after shocking beagles until they cowered, urinating, on the bottom of their cages.)

Yank a country’s water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

The sim will feature an AR avatar for each person in the real world, based upon data collected about us from government records and the internet.”

The continuity of government folks’ AI program and the Pentagon’s AI program may or may not be linked, but they both indicate massive spying and artificial intelligence in order to manipulate the American public, to concentrate power, to take away the liberties and freedoms of average Americans, and — worst of all — to induce chaos in order to achieve these ends.

PBS Nova reported in 2009:

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell’s Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected—through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records—it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has quit, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.

Known as Aquaint, which stands for “Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence” [which is run by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)], part of the new M Square Research Park in College Park, Maryland. A mammoth two million-square-foot, 128-acre complex, it is operated in collaboration with the University of Maryland. “Their budget is classified, but I understand it’s very well funded,” said Brian Darmody, the University of Maryland’s assistant vice president of research and economic development, referring to IARPA. “They’ll be in their own building here, and they’re going to grow. Their mission is expanding.”

***

In a 2004 pilot project, a mass of data was gathered from news stories taken from the New York Times, the AP news wire, and the English portion of the Chinese Xinhua news wire covering 1998 to 2000. Then, 13 U.S. military intelligence analysts searched the data and came up with a number of scenarios based on the material. Finally, using those scenarios, an NSA analyst developed 50 topics, and in each of those topics created a series of questions for Aquaint’s computerized brain to answer. “Will the Japanese use force to defend the Senkakus?” was one. “What types of disputes or conflict between the PLA [People's Liberation Army] and Hong Kong residents have been reported?” was another. And “Who were the participants in this spy ring, and how are they related to each other?” was a third. Since then, the NSA has attempted to build both on the complexity of the system—more essay-like answers rather than yes or no—and on attacking greater volumes of data.

“The technology behaves like a robot, understanding and answering complex questions,” said a former Aquaint researcher. “Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the most memorable character, HAL 9000, having a conversation with David. We are essentially building this system. We are building HAL.” A naturalized U.S. citizen who received her Ph.D. from Columbia, the researcher worked on the program for several years but eventually left due to moral concerns. “The system can answer the question, ‘What does X think about Y?’” she said. “Working for the government is great, but I don’t like looking into other people’s secrets.

A supersmart search engine, capable of answering complex questions such as “What were the major issues in the last 10 presidential elections?” would be very useful for the public. But that same capability in the hands of an agency like the NSA—absolutely secret, often above the law, resistant to oversight, and with access to petabytes of private information about Americans—could be a privacy and civil liberties nightmare. “We must not forget that the ultimate goal is to transfer research results into operational use,” said Aquaint project leader John Prange, in charge of information exploitation for IARPA.

Once up and running, the database of old newspapers could quickly be expanded to include an inland sea of personal information scooped up by the agency’s warrantless data suction hoses. Unregulated, they could ask it to determine which Americans might likely pose a security risk—or have sympathies toward a particular cause, such as the antiwar movement, as was done during the 1960s and 1970s. The Aquaint robospy might then base its decision on the type of books a person purchased online, or chat room talk, or websites visited—or a similar combination of data. Such a system would have an enormous chilling effect on everyone’s everyday activities—what will the Aquaint computer think if I buy this book, or go to that website, or make this comment? Will I be suspected of being a terrorist or a spy or a subversive?

World Net Daily’s Aaron Klein reported earlier this month:

In February, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the Massachusetts-based multinational corporation, Raytheon – the world’s fifth largest defense contractor – had developed a “Google for Spies” operation.

Herald reporter Ryan Gallagher wrote that Raytheon had “secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites” like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.

The software is called RIOT, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology.

Raytheon told the Herald it has not sold RIOT to any clients but admitted that, in 2010, it had shared the program’s software technology with the U.S. government as part of a “joint research and development effort … to help build a national security system capable of analyzing ‘trillions of entities’ from cyberspace.”

In April, RIOT was reportedly showcased at a U.S. government and industry national security conference for secretive, classified innovations, where it was listed under the category “big data – analytics, algorithms.”

Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, argued …that among the many problems with government large-scale analytics of social network information “is the prospect that government agencies will blunderingly use these techniques to tag, target and watchlist people coughed up by programs such as RIOT, or to target them for further invasions of privacy based on incorrect inferences.”

“The chilling effects of such activities,” he concluded, “while perhaps gradual, would be tremendous.”

Ginger McCall, attorney and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Open Government program, told NBC in February, “This sort of software allows the government to surveil everyone.

“It scoops up a bunch of information about totally innocent people. There seems to be no legitimate reason to get this, other than that they can.”

As for RIOT’s ability to help catch terrorists, McCall called it “a lot of white noise.”[True ... Big data doesn't work to keep us safe.]

The London Guardian further obtained a four-minute video that shows how the RIOT software uses photographs on social networks. The images, sometimes containing latitude and longitude details, are “automatically embedded by smartphones within so-called ‘exif header data.’

RIOT pulls out this information, analyzing not only the photographs posted by individuals, but also the location where these images were taken,” the Guardian reported.
Such sweeping data collection and analysis to predict future activity may further explain some of what the government is doing with the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. [Background here.]

***

“In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are “nodes,” and relationships and interactions form the “links” binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent,”reported the Times.[Background here.]

In February 2006, more than a year after Obama was sworn as a U.S. senator, it was revealed the “supposedly defunct” Total Information Awareness data-mining and profiling program had been acquired by the NSA.

The Total Information Awareness program was first announced in 2002 as an early effort to mine large volumes of data for hidden connections.

Aaron Klein reported last week that Snowden might have worked at the NSA’s artificial intelligence unit at the University of Maryland:

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations, told the London Guardian newspaperthat he previously worked as a security guard for what the publication carefully described as “one of the agency’s covert facilities at the University of Maryland.”

***

Brian Ullmann, the university’s assistant vice president for marketing and communications, was asked for comment. He would not address the query, posed twice to his department by KleinOnline, about whether the NSA operates covert facilities in conjunction with the university.

Ullmann’s only comment was to affirm that Snowden was employed as a security guard at the university’s Center for the Advanced Study of Languages in 2005.

This is especially concerning given that the people who created the NSA spying program in the first place say that information gained through spying will be used to frame Americans that the government takes a dislike to.


http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/ ... gence.html

Mind Control

Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology: Hacking the Mind
By Carole Smith / Dissent MagazineOctober 11th, 2013

Intrusive Brain Reading Surveillance Technology: Hacking the Mind
Also see: “Hearing “Voices” – The Hidden History of the CIA’s Electromagnetic Mind Control Experiments”

Carole Smith describes claims that neuroscientists [have developed] brain scans that can read people’s intentions in the absence of serious discussions about the ethical issues this raises, despite the fact that the research has been backed by government in the UK and US.

(Carole Smith was born and educated in Australia, where she gained a Bachelor of Arts degree at Sydney University. She trained as a psychoanalyst in London where she has had a private practice. In recent years she has been a researcher into the invasive methods of accessing minds using technological means, and has published papers on the subject. She has written the first draft of a book entitled: “The Controlled Society”.)


“We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.

‘The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.”

Dr José Delgado.Director of Neuropsychiatry, Yale University Medical School Congressional Record, No. 26, Vol. 118 February 24, 1974.

The Guardian newspaper, that defender of truth in the United Kingdom, published an article by Science Correspondent Ian Sample on 9 February 2007 entitled: ‘The Brain Scan that can read people’s intentions’, with the sub-heading: ‘Call for ethical debate over possible use of new technology in interrogation”.

“Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall”, the scientists were reported as saying.

At the same time, London’s Science Museum was holding an exhibition entitled ‘Neurobotics: The Future of Thinking’. This venue had been chosen for the launch in October 2006 of the news that human thoughts could be read using a scanner. Dr Geraint Rees’ smiling face could be seen in a photograph at the Neurobotics website[1], under the heading “The Mind Reader”. Dr Rees is one of the scientists who have apparently cracked the problem which has preoccupied philosophers and scientists since before Plato: they had made entry into the conscious mind. Such a reversal of human historical evolution, announced in such a pedestrian fashion, makes one wonder what factors have been in play, and what omissions made, in getting together this show, at once banal and extraordinary. The announcement arrives as if out of a vacuum. The neuroscientist – modern-style hunter-gatherer of information and darling of the “Need to Know” policies of modern government – does little to explain how he achieved this goal of entering the conscious mind, nor does he put his work into any historical context. Instead, we are asked in the Science Museum’s programme notes:

How would you feel if someone could read your innermost thoughts? Geraint Rees of UCL says he can. By using brain-imaging technology he’s beginning to decode thought and explore the difference between the conscious and unconscious mind. But how far will it go? And shouldn’t your thoughts remain your personal business?

If Dr Rees has decoded the mind sufficiently for such an announcement to be made in an exhibition devoted to it, presumably somewhere is the mind which has been, and is continuing to be, decoded. He is not merely continuing his experiments using functional magnetic resolution scanning (fMRI) in the way neuroscientists have been observing their subjects under scanning devices for years, asking them to explain what they feel or think while the scientists watch to see which area lights up, and what the cerebral flow in the brain indicates for various brain areas. Dr Rees is decoding the mind in terms of conscious and unconscious processes. For that, one must have accessed consciousness itself. Whose consciousness? Where is the owner of that consciousness – and unconsciousness? How did he/she feel? Why not ask them to tell us how it feels, instead of asking us.

The Neurobotics Exhibition was clearly set up to make these exciting new discoveries an occasion for family fun, and there were lots of games for visitors to play. One gets the distinct impression that we are being softened up for the introduction of radical new technology which will, perhaps, make the mind a communal pool rather than an individual possession. Information technology seeks to connect us all to each other in as many ways as possible, but also, presumably, to those vast data banks which allow government control not only to access all information about our lives, but now also to our thoughts, even to our unconscious processing. Does anyone care?

One of the most popular exhibits was the ‘Mindball’ game, which required two players to go literally head-to-head in a battle for brainpower, and used ‘brainpower’ alone. Strapped up with headbands which pick up brain waves, the game uses neurofeedback, but the person who is calm and relaxed wins the game. One received the impression that this calmness was the spirit that the organisers wished to reinforce, to deflect any undue public panic that might arise from the news that private thoughts could now be read with a scanner.[2] The ingress into the mind as a private place was primarily an event to be enjoyed with the family on an afternoon out:

Imagine being able to control a computer with only the power of your mind. Or read people’s thoughts and know if they’re lying. And what if a magnetic shock to the brain could make you more creative…but should we be able to engineer our minds?

Think your thoughts are private? Ever told a lie and been caught red-handed? Using brain-scanning technology, scientists are beginning to probe our minds and tell if we’re lying. Other scientists are decoding our desires and exploring the difference between our conscious and unconscious mind. But can you really trust the technology?

Other searching questions are raised in the program notes, and more games:

Find out if you’ve got what it takes to be a modern-day spy in this new interactive family exhibition. After being recruited as a trainee spy, explore the skills and abilities required by real agents and use some of the latest technologies that help spies gather and analyse information. Later go on and discover what it’s like to be spied upon. Uncover a secret store of prototype gadgets that give you a glimpse into the future of spy technologies and finally use everything you’ve learnt to escape before qualifying as a fully-fledged agent!

There were also demonstrations of grateful paraplegics and quadriplegics showing how the gods of science have so unselfishly liberated them from their prisons: this was the serious Nobel Prize side of the show. But there was no-one representing Her Majesty’s government to demonstrate how these very same devices[3] can be used quite freely, and with relative ease, in our wireless age[4], to conduct experiments on free-ranging civilians tracked anywhere in the world, and using an infinitely extendable form of electrode which doesn’t require visible contact with the scalp at all. Electrodes, like electricity, can also take an invisible form – an electrode is a terminal of an electric source through which electrical energy or current may flow in or out. The brain itself is an electrical circuit. Every brain has its own unique resonating frequency. The brain is an infinitely more sensitive receiver and transmitter than the computer, and even in the wireless age, the comprehension of how wireless networks operate appears not to extend to the workings of the brain. The monotonous demonstration of scalps with electrodes attached to them, in order to demonstrate the contained conduction of electrical charges, is a scientific fatuity, in so far as it is intended to demonstrate comprehensively the capability of conveying charges to the brain, or for that matter, to any nerve in the body, as a form of invisible torture.

As Neurobotics claims: ‘Your brain is amazing’, but the power and control over brains and nervous systems achieved by targeting brain frequencies with radiowaves must have been secretly amazing government scientists for many years. The problem that now arises, at the point of readiness when so much has been achieved, is how to put the technology into action in such a way, as it will be acceptable in the public domain. This requires getting it through wider government and legal bodies, and for that, it must be seen to spring from the unbiased scientific investigations into the workings of the brain, in the best tradition of the leading universities. It is given over to Dr Rees and his colleague, Professor Haynes, endowed with the disclosure for weightier Guardian readers, to carry the torch for the government. Those involved may also have noted the need to show the neuroscientist in a more responsible light, following US neuroengineer for government sponsored Lockheed Martin, John Norseen’s, ingenuous comment, in 2000, about his belief about the consequences of his work in fMRI:

‘If this research pans out’, said Norseen, ‘you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it.’ And added: “The ethics don’t concern me, but they should concern someone else.”

While the neuroscientists report their discovery (without even so much as the specific frequency of the light employed by this scanner/torch), issuing ethical warnings while incongruously continuing with their mind-blowing work, the government which sponsors them, remains absolutely mute. The present probing of people’s intentions, minds, background thoughts, hopes and emotions[5] is being expanded into the more complex and subtle aspects of thinking and feeling. We have, however, next to no technical information about their methods. The description of ‘shining a torch around the brain’ is as absurd a report as one could read of a scientific endeavor, especially one that carries such enormous implications for the future of mankind. What is this announcement, with its technical obfuscation, preparing us for?

Writing in Wired[6] contributing editor Steve Silberman points out that the lie-detection capability of fMRI is ‘poised to transform the security system, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy’. He quotes Cephos founder, Steven Laken, whose company plans to market the new technology for lie detection. Laken cites detainees held without charge at Guantanamo Bay as a potential example. ‘If these detainees have information we haven’t been able to extract that could prevent another 9/11, I think most Americans would agree that we should be doing whatever it takes to extract it’. Silberman also quotes Paul Root Wolpe, a senior fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, who describes the accelerated advances in fMRI as ‘ a textbook example of how something can be pushed forward by the convergence of basic science, the government directing research through funding, and special interests who desire a particular technology’. Are we to believe that with the implied capability to scan jurors’ brains, the judiciary, the accused and the defendant alike, influencing[7] one at the expense of the other, that the legal implications alone of mind-accessing scanners on university campuses, would not rouse the Minister for Justice from his bench to say a few words about these potential mind weapons?

So what of the ethical debate called for by the busy scientists and the Guardian’s science reporter?[8] Can this technology- more powerful in subverting thought itself than anything in prior history – really be confined to deciding whether the ubiquitously invoked terrorist has had the serious intention of blowing up the train, or whether it was perhaps a foolish prank to make a bomb out of chapatti flour? We can assume that the government would certainly not give the go-ahead to the Science Museum Exhibition, linked to Imperial College, a major government-sponsored institution in laser-physics, if it was detrimental to surveillance programs. It is salutary to bear in mind that government intelligence research is at least ten years ahead of any public disclosure. It is implicit from history that whatever affords the undetectable entry by the gatekeepers of society into the brain and mind, will not only be sanctioned, but funded and employed by the State, more specifically by trained operatives in the security forces, given powers over defenceless citizens, and unaccountable to them.[9]

The actual technology which is now said to be honing the technique ‘to distinguish between passing thoughts and genuine intentions’ is described by Professor John-Dylan Haynes in the Guardian in the most disarmingly untechnical language which must surely not have been intended to enlighten.

The Guardian piece ran as follows:


A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act.

The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists’ ability to probe people’s minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.

‘Using the scanner, we could look around the brain for this information and read out something that from the outside there’s no way you could possibly tell is in there. It’s like shining a torch around, looking for writing on a wall,’ said John-Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, who led the study with colleagues at University College London and Oxford University.

We know therefore that they are using light, but fMRI has been used for many years to attempt the unravelling of neuronal activity, and while there have been many efforts to record conscious and unconscious processes, with particular emphasis on the visual cortex, there has been no progress into consciousness itself. We can be sure that we are not being told the real story.

Just as rats and chimpanzees have been used to demonstrate findings from remote experiments on humans, electrode implants used on cockroaches to remotely control them, lasers used to steer fruit-flies[10] [11], and worms engineered so that their nerves and muscles can be controlled with pinpricks of light[12], the information and techniques that have been ruthlessly forged using opportunistic onslaughts on defenceless humans as guinea pigs – used for myriad purposes from creating 3D haptic gloves in computer games to creating artificial intelligence to send visual processing into outer space – require appropriate replication for peer group approval and to meet ethical demands for scientific and public probity.

The use of light to peer into the brain is almost certainly that of terahertz, which occurs in the wavelengths which lie between 30mm and 1mm of the electromagnetic spectrum. Terahertz has the ability to penetrate deep into organic materials, without (it is said) the damage associated with ionising radiation such as x-rays. It can distinguish between materials with varying water content – for example fat versus lean meat. These properties lend themselves to applications in process and quality control as well as biomedical imaging. Terahertz can penetrate bricks, and also human skulls. Other applications can be learnt from the major developer of terahertz in the UK, Teraview, which is in Cambridge, and partially owned by Toshiba.

Efforts to alert human rights’ groups about the loss of the mind as a place to call your own, have met with little discernible reaction, in spite of reports about over decades of the dangers of remote manipulation using technology to access the mind[13], Dr Nick Begich’s book, Controlling the human mind[14], being an important recent contribution. A different approach did in fact, elicit a response. When informed of the use of terahertz at Heathrow and Luton airports in the UK to scan passengers, the news that passengers would be revealed naked by a machine which looked directly through their clothes produced a small, but highly indignant, article in the spring 2007 edition of the leading human rights organisation, Liberty.[15] If the reading of the mind met with no protest, seeing through one’s clothes certainly did. It seems humans’ assumption of the mind as a private place has been so secured by evolution that it will take a sustained battle to convince the public that, through events of which we are not yet fully informed, such former innocence has been lost.

Trained light, targeted atomic spectroscopy, the use of powerful magnets to absorb moisture from human tissues, the transfer of radiative energy – these have replaced the microwave harassment which was used to transmit auditory messages directly into the hearing.[16] With the discovery of light to disentangle thousands of neurons and encode signals from the complex circuitry of the brain, present programs will not even present the symptoms which simulated schizoid states. Medically, even if terahertz does not ionise, we do not yet know how the sustained application of intense light will affect the delicate workings of the brain and how cells might be damaged, dehydrated, stretched, obliterated.

This year, 2007, has also brought the news that terahertz lasers small enough to incorporate into portable devices had been developed.[17]

Sandia National Laboratories in the US in collaboration with MIT have produced a transmitter-receiver (transceiver) that enables a number of applications. In addition to scanning for explosives, we may also assume their integration into hand-held communication systems. ‘These semiconductor devices have output powers which previously could only be obtained by molecular gas lasers occupying cubic meters and weighing more than 100kg, or free electron lasers weighing tons and occupying buildings.’ As far back as 1996 the US Air Force Scientific Advisory Board predicted that the development of electromagnetic energy sources would ‘open the door for the development of some novel capabilities that can be used in armed conflict, in terrorist/hostage situations, and in training’ and ‘new weapons that offer the opportunity of control of an adversary … can be developed around this concept’.[18]

The surveillance technology of today is the surveillance of the human mind and, through access to the brain and nervous system, the control of behaviour and the body’s functions. The messaging of auditory hallucinations has given way to silent techniques of influencing and implanting thoughts. The development of the terahertz technologies has illuminated the workings of the brain, facilitated the capture of emitted photons which are derived from the visual cortex which processes picture formation in the brain, and enabled the microelectronic receiver which has, in turn, been developed by growing unique semi-conductor crystals. In this way, the technology is now in place for the detection and reading of spectral ‘signatures’ of gases. All humans emit gases. Humans, like explosives, emit their own spectral signature in the form of a gas. With the reading of the brain’s electrical frequency, and of the spectral gas signature, the systems have been established for the control of populations – and with the necessary technology integrated into a cell-phone.

‘We are very optimistic about working in the terahertz electromagnetic spectrum,’ says the principal investigator of the Terahertz Microelectronics Transceiver at Sandia: ‘This is an unexplored area, and a lot of science can come out of it. We are just beginning to scratch the surface of what THz can do to improve national security’.

NOTES

[1] http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/antenna ... te/121.asp

At the time of writing it is still accessible. The exhibition ran from October 2006 to April 2007.

[2] Where are the scanners? Who controls them? Are they guarded by police to avoid them being stolen by terrorists? How many are they in number? Are they going into mass production? Do we have any say about their deployment? It is perhaps not unduly paranoid to want to have some answers to these questions.

[3] There is insufficient space here to deal with microchips, the covert implantation of radio transmitting devices which were referred to in Senator Glenn’s extraordinary speech to Congress on the occasion of his attempt to introduce the Human Research Subject Protection Act in 1997:

http://www.ahrp.org/InformedConsent/glennConsent.php

[4] Ref: The Coming Wireless revolution: When Everything Connects: The Economist: 26 April 2007.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/Printe ... id=9080024

[5] Guardian: ‘The Brain Scan that can read people’s intentions’: 9 February 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/sto ... 29,00.html

[6] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/lying_pr.html

[7] I say, ‘influencing’, advisedly since the technology that enables thoughts to be accessed, certainly also allows for the dulling of mental processes, the interference of memory, the excitation of mental or bodily processes, the infliction of pain on any organ or nerve, the increase of blood pressure, breathing or the slowing down of these, as well as the activation of rage, sadness, hysteria, or inappropriate behaviour. Ref:John Norseen’s work: Images of Mind: The Semiotic Alphabet. The implantation of silent messages, experienced as thoughts arising in the mind, is now possible.

[8] Despite three letters to the Guardian science correspondent, and Editor, I had no reply from them, having asked them to consider my points, as psychoanalyst and researcher, for the ethical debate which was called for. Nor was there any response from my approach to the Cambridge ethicists and scientists who were said to be forming a committee. I have seen no correspondence nor reference to the whole matter since February, 2007. There was some marked regression in the New Scientist about worms being used for experiments for remote control

See: Douglas Fox, ‘Remote Control Brains: a neuroscience revolution’, New Scientist, 18 July 2007.

[9] The covert action group in the newly formed CIA recommended to President Eisenhower in 1954 that the US must pursue “a fundamentally repugnant philosophy”, and that they must learn to “subvert, sabotage and destroy” its enemies by “more clever and more ruthless methods” than those of its opponents:

Ref: James Doolittle et al: “The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Univ.Alabama Press, 1984.

[10] Fruit flies share to a remarkable degree, the DNA of humans.

[11] Fruit Flies and You: NASA sends fruit flies into Space:

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004 ... uitfly.htm

[12] Ref: New Scientist, 18 July 2007: ‘Remote Control Brains: a neuroscience revolution’:

http://www.science.org.au/nova/newscien ... ns_003.htm

[13] See author’s paper: http://www.btinternet.com/~psycho_social/Vol3/V3.html

[14] Nick Begich, Controlling the human mind: the technologies of political control or tools for peak performance, Earthpulse Press Publications.

[15] Liberty, and Lawyers for Liberty have staunchly maintained a thorough-going campaign against the protracted government plan to issue biometric ID cards, taking the case to the House of Lords where they have gained support. In view of the undisclosed work being carried out which will enable direct access to the brain through the technology coming to light, and using light, one cannot but suspect that the biometric ID card is but an adjunct to the tracking and data sourcing of citizens, and as such has fulfilled the function of a very effective smokescreen, having deflected the energies of the protectors of individual liberties in terms of thousands of hours of concentrated protest effort, with enormous expenditure spent on their campaign.

[16] Human subjects, once computers for research experiments program them, remain targeted, even if the original reasons for their usage have become obsolete. Some have been continuously abused for over thirty years.

[17] Thz Lasers Small Enough for Screening Devices:

http://www.photonics.com/content/ news/2007/February/7/86317.aspx

http://www.whatsnextnetwork.com/technol ... tter_recei

[18] http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/vistas/vistas.htm

hanshan wrote:‘If this research pans out’, said Norseen, ‘you can begin to manipulate what someone is thinking even before they know it.’ And added: “The ethics don’t concern me, but they should concern someone else.”

Efforts to alert human rights’ groups about the loss of the mind as a place to call your own, have met with little discernible reaction, in spite of reports about over decades of the dangers of remote manipulation using technology to access the mind

‘The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective.

In Texas, Search Warrants Can Now Be Based on a "Prediction of a Future Crime"
By Eric Nicholson Tue., Dec. 17 2013 at 8:00 AM

Police in Parker County had been watching Michael Fred Wehrenberg's home for a month when, late in the summer of 2010, they received a tip from a confidential informant that Wehrenberg and several others were "fixing to" cook meth. Hours later, after midnight, officers walked through the front door, rounded up the people inside, and kept them in handcuffs in the front yard for an hour and a half.

The only potential problem, at least from a constitutional standpoint, was that the cops didn't have a search warrant. They got one later, before they seized the boxes of pseudoephedrine, stripped lithium batteries, and other meth-making materials, while the alleged meth cooks waited around in handcuffs, but by then they'd already waltzed through the home uninvited. They neglected to mention this on their warrant application, identifying a confidential informant as their only source of information.

Wehrenberg's lawyers argued during materials that the seized materials had been taken illegally and shouldn't be allowed as evidence. The motion was denied -- the trial court cited federal "independent source doctrine," which allows illegally seized evidence a third party told them about beforehand -- and Wehrenberg pleaded guilty to one count of possession and one count of intent to manufacture, getting five years in prison.

See also: Texas' Highest Criminal Court Overturns Ban on "Titillating Talk" With Minors

The Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth wasn't so eager to overlook what appeared to be a clear case of police misconduct and overturned the lower court's ruling.

But it's the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that has the final say, and last week they agreed with the trial court. In a majority opinion, Judge Elsa Alcala wrote that, while Texas' "exclusionary rule" bans illegally seized evidence from trial, federal precedent dictates that it can be introduced if it was first confirmed by an independent source.

Find out what experts say about the case after the jump.


Grits for Breakfast's Scott Henson, who first reported the case, isn't sure how significant the decision will prove to be on the ground.

"But the actions of police in the case don't pass the smell test," he writes. "If their informant was so credible, why not go to the judge for a search warrant in the 3-4 hours before their illegal entry? The judge was available in the middle of the night, so there's little basis to believe they couldn't have gotten it earlier. And why conceal the fact that they'd already swept the house and detained the suspects in the search warrant application if everything was on the up and up?"

He has a kindred spirit in CCA Judge Lawrence Meyers, who was the only justice to dissent. As Meyers wrote, "it is obvious to me that this search warrant was obtained based upon the officers' unlawful entry into [Wehrenberg]'s residence."

There was more than enough time to secure a search warrant before the officers' intrusion into the premises, but they deliberately chose not to attempt to obtain it until after they had conducted the unlawful entry. Further, had the officers entered the home and found the occupants only baking cupcakes, the officers would not have bothered to then obtain the warrant at all. It was only after unlawfully entering and finding suspicious activity that they felt the need to then secure the warrant in order to cover their tracks and collect the evidence without the taint of their entry.

In addition, Meyers argues that the confidential informant's report that Wehrenberg was "fixing to" cook meth wasn't independent evidence but a prediction of a future crime. The majority's decision, he writes, means that "search warrants may now be based on predictions of the commission of future crimes," which is an uncomfortable concept to say the least.



http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairp ... h_warr.php

In Texas, Search Warrants Can Now Be Based on a "Prediction of a Future Crime"

Number of the year 2013

Number 33.86

Paul Lewis, presenter of Moneybox, on BBC Radio: My number is 33.86 - that's the number of petaflops achieved in 2013 by the new holder of the title "world's fastest computer".

Peta is a million billion - that's 10 to the power of 15. A flop is one floating point operation per second. Think of it as multiplying two really long numbers together in a second - that is a flop. So a petaflop computer can do a million billion long multiplications every second, and get them right.

When the list of fastest computers was published in June, China's new Tianhe-2 computer went straight in at number one. It achieved 33.86 petaflops, which was nearly twice as fast as the runner up, a computer called Titan in the US Department of Energy. It was still the fastest in the latest list published in November.
Tianhe-2 Tiane-2 was built by the National University of Defense Technology

It's doing 33,860 million billion sums every second. Computing records seldom last long and two months before China's great leap forward the first one-petaflop computer, which was king in 2008, was decommissioned for being too slow.

When the next list comes out Tianhe-2 may beat itself. Its theoretical top speed is more than 50 petaflops but even that record may soon go because the geeks are betting on a 1 exoflop machine by 2017. That's a billion sums every billionth of a second.