DARPA's New Mind Control Tech a “Taste of Armageddon?”

Topher Morrison

PurpleSerf.com

From the BBC

On Friday we briefly covered at AMTV News an intriguing new development in the realm of neuroscience and its potential commercial and most likely military applications.  According to the BBC, the new project “Sentinel (SystEm for Notification of Threats Inspired by Neurally Enabled Learning)…is being touted as the world’s first ‘cognitive-neural’ binocular-threat warning system.

Sharon Weinberger explains how it works in practice:

“A high-tech camera scans a wide field of view, and then picks out potential threats based on sophisticated algorithms that mimic the human vision system. Then images of those threats are flashed in rapid succession through a viewer to the user, whose brain signals are being monitored. When the brain spots a potential threat and gives off the P300, the signal is detected and the user is visually alerted to focus on that specific image.”

The goggles were developed under a research project funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  It is an initial foray into “military neuro-enhancement using what is called a brain-machine interface.”  DARPA is preparing to embark on a veritable “brain race” funding similar brain-computer interface projects to help “intelligence analysts sort through satellite imagery.”

Commercial and medical applications are foreseeable including “controlling prosthetics” and for the “automotive industry” to help design safer cars.  According to the chief scientist Dr. Deepak Khosla of HRL Laboratories, however, the “holy grail of course” is whether or not these technologies can be designed to “decode higher level information” – to read minds.

Beyond mind reading the military applications proffer “more novel use of armed drones” ultimately allowing soldiers to fight remotely and brining up a host of ethical issues over “projecting human intelligence into a device” according to Jonathan Moreno, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Should an adversary use similar technologies the dynamics of future wars, where mass armies of drones fight each other under control of distant humans, would be wildly dissimilar to today’s.

Star Trek Episode: “A Taste of Armageddon”

In Gene Roddenberry’s first Star Trek series in 1967 the original crew of the USS Enterprise visit the planet Eminiar VII whose people fight a war with a neighboring planet.  However, once visiting the planet Captain James T. Kirk is warned by Eminiar leaders he should not have come because a Vendikar fusion bomb had just hit and killed a half million people.  The only problem is the capitol city is in pristine order, there are no signs of war and no destruction to speak of. 

The crew of the Enterprise soon finds out that the people of Eminiar VII fight a totally simulated war, but it turns out to be no mere game of intergalactic Risk.  It is completely controlled by computer algorithms, which launch wargame attacks and counterattacks, then calculate the damage and select the dead.  Citizens deemed as “killed” must submit themselves to real executions inside “disintegration booths” based on the results.

While our current small wars have little resemblance to the World Wars of the last century and future wars waged against emergent nations of China and Russia may resemble the Cold War – proxy war – may take on a whole new meaning as both sides employ newer and newer technologies.

STEP ONE: Admit There is a Problem.

Is there any doubt at all that when Janet Napolitano and Co. sat down and formulated the recent policy to backscatter x-ray and patdown airline passengers that an ideal model would have seen the American public enthusiastically compliant?  Put another way, if Big Sis and her bureaucratic automatons wanted a debate they would have asked Congress to mull it over.

Let us make no mistake about it; radiate and fondle first, ask questions later, is a bureaucracy’s modus operandi.  Testaments to this fact are found on every line of the Federal Register’s staggering 70,000 plus pages of yearly rules and regulations amassed by the arbitrary decisions of an alphabet soup of government agencies.  If anyone thought sifting through a Wikileaks dump or reading over 2500 pages of HR 3590 i.e. Obama Care was daunting I’d suggest an aspirin regimen and a few Five Hour Energies to chase before attempting to tackle this legal juggernaut.  Bills have been introduced that would force Congress to vote on these laws individually, thus mitigating their volume, and be held accountable for their promulgation, but appropriately they have never enjoyed an up or down vote.

These agencies stand outside the Constitution and as our de facto fourth branch of government – unelected, entrenched, and relentless.  Bi-partisan in the most nefarious way, transcending administration after administration and retaining the modern day status of oracles these agencies (recently doubled in size by the passage of HR 3590) have effectively usurped all three branches of government.  They enjoy undue autonomy legislating, judging, and enforcing virtually anything they please.  For Congress they are sometimes a political whipping boy other times a trophy.  For the Courts they alleviate bottle necking and are deferred to for “technical expertise.”  For the Executive and its countless Czars they are, in aggregate, the iron hand of American democracy, a zombie relic, built over the years by countless executive orders and maintained under constant deference by Congress.

For those of you unfamiliar with Thomas Hobbes perhaps Transformer’s Devastator is a better metaphor for what has increasingly come into view.  What was once out of reach and buried in the monotonous layers of government white papers, internal memos, the Federal Register, and obscure declassified documents is now easily accessible and out in the open.  The foreign and domestic arms of American governance have clasped around the people.  The byproducts of our “Global Force for Good” and its military adventures over seas are being used literally in our own backyard.  The seamless connections from the military industrial complex buttressed by a private amalgam of domestic defense contractors to their ties and influence on these domestic agencies is simple to trace and easy to understand.

You couldn’t write this stuff any better than how it is unfolding… Pre-crime software is being used in Baltimore, Philidelphia, and DC, multi-million dollar insect spies are an order away from swarming all over the US, the very same military spy blimps ordered by our military “for use overseas” will be used against/for us very soon here at home laden with field-tested military technology that will scan 3000 license plates per hour, see at night, are easily retrofitted with facial recognition cameras, and will tie into hundreds if not thousands of external cameras in a real-time virtual “crime” network. 

The information gathered is capable of being stored and shared with threat fusion centers (admittedly ran without Congressional oversight) easily disseminated to DC or what will be, for all intents and purposes, NSA West, a 1.5 million square foot Cyber Security Center that might even make the Pentagon blush.  Do we want to become like England, where this type of surveillance is soon to become commonplace?  Has Orwell’s clairvoyant Nineteen Eighty Four become just another benighted warning?

Airport patdowns were just the beginning!  Homeland Security (DHS) and its Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) teams have rolled out in “pilot” programs industrial grade radiation units for use on America’s highways, backscatter x-ray vans have been sold in the US able to “image vehicles and their contents” as well as “penetrate clothing”, a veritable Google Van on steroids.  Mobile interrogation trailers saturated with Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) developed in cooperation with “industry leaders” for headline events are on standby, portable DNA scanners are in beta testing and are able to identify a human being in under an hour. 

Our young ones aren’t safe either, the government has been successfully sued for taking and cataloging newborn DNA, the only problem is that it’s essentially legal to do since the “Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act” was singed into law.  Incidently this passed unrecorded by voice vote in the House and unanimously in the Senate, also unrecorded.  Sometimes even when Congress does vote they make sure it is a secret!

If DHS doesn’t stop you in the airport or on the streets, they have invaded Walmarts all over the country with thousands of government-sponsored screens inundating a routine grocery run with their exhausting “See Something Say Something” campaign.  In another nauseating example of "agency initiative" was in 2007 when Congress revealed DHS created, without approval, the National Applications Office (NAO) charged with turning spy satellites on the US.  Recently, in a totally unrelated vein, the US and Germany (US occupied territory) under the popular guise of an innocuous “commercial program” are planning on deploying multiple billion dollar spy satellites in 2012 and 2013.  One has to wonder why the US would need another set of cutting edge multibillion dollar spy satellites since they have already launched into space “the largest [spy] satellite in the world” and plan on sending more.

I was going to include more on internet kill switches, internet IDs, and how the US Air Force has been soliciting persona software management in order to operate an army of fake virtual people replete with their own IP address, hair color, significant others, but most importantly opinion.  Yes, they're planning for a potential clandestine campaign to “manufacture consensus” or to be used for “cognitive infiltration.”  These you’ll have to look up on your own!

This barrage of information is just a smattering of what we encounter on a weekly if not daily basis and is almost too much to cover and Purple Serf and Free Humanity need your help.  It would be like sand through our fingers if it wasn’t for archival technology and hyperlinks.  Many of us have started to report on what is going on ourselves, turned off our TVs and along with it the obnoxious graphics, $1000 suits, and 10,000watt smiles that used to represent legitimacy and which still propagandize and compartmentalize our information.  This is only the first step – admitting and we have a problem and talking about it.