I'd speculate that, after such an age of barbaric experimentation, new and supposedly more innocuous methods that don't require physically detaining/restraining a subject have long since been conceived, implemented, and tried.
I don't know, some of the things they were doing up there were just ridiculous and useless. Like putting a woman in a chemically induced coma for a year, and playing high volume affirmations though a headset she wore the whole time. The doctor who started all this up there was just Mengele with a Psych degree and some very stupid ideas.
Many MKUltra documents were shredded, and even those recovered were of little scientific benefit due to the way the experiments were carried out. So many people had their lives irrevocably destroyed, and for absolutely nothing of value.
According to Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the purpose of the experiments was to find a reliable way to manipulate people so that they'd stay manipulated. The CIA was having a very hard time establishing reliable agents and informants behind the Iron Curtain, because all they really had to offer was stupendous amounts of money, and people weren't staying bought. Their targets generally didn't buy the ideological angle.
From that (odious) perspective, I don't think the experiments were ridiculous, though they did turn out to be useless. At the time it was pretty common to view breaking a personality down as a viable path to establishing control over it. The Koreans had done similar things to American prisoners, with some minor, temporary effectiveness.
The best approach of all would be to get people to volunteer and consume all the information you want before they even commit a crime. You could entice them with hard-to-resist benefits like cheaper groceries or a more active dating life.
Do any modern day entities (governments, corporations, other) perform ostensibly mild versions of such psychological experimentation, possibly at scale, or with the intention of scaling?
This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.
If their users did not read that clause in the user agreement and knowingly consent to the experiments, then they are being carried out without the users' consent.
Almost certainly. One of the wider goals of past projects was to influence opinion over large groups of people. It seems likely that the various state forces using social media to sway opinion come from research on influencing opinion.
Additionally, the US torture of alleged terrorist detainees was called "enhanced interrogation" as a link to such testing. As we still have black sites, and a desire for more information, I personally assume there is still testing being done.
The biggest impediment to a politician who in good-will wants to implement actually crucial policies is public opinion.
The problem is so bad that politicians don't actually talk about the hard work -- hours of reunions, negotiations, high-stake talks, etc --, because being honest and open has a detrimental effect on achieving their goals. Lies or half-lies are more effective, even when they are honestly doing what's best for us, because it's easier to accept an uncomplicated lie or half-lie than a complicated truth.
The problem, I guess, is that we have a representational democracy but representational democracies have operational flaws and that the will of the people sometimes leads to a mass grave for them. Sometimes our representatives are better educated and positioned to call the shots, but are held back by misconceived public opinion -- aggravated by the fact that the truth is never actually told by any side and debates are over who can "sell" the most convincing story based on "established" lies and half-lies.
It's a delicate balance of power. In a way, it is justifiable for the government (a faceless system where the responsibility is diffused to so many people that no one is almost ever truly individually responsible) to want to manipulate public opinion (or influence public opinion, in politically correct terms). In another, it is tipping the balance of power to the already powerful and this can cause problems.
That says nothing about "populations" or "dispersed", and in fact given the context it's pretty clearly desired as a tool for use by field agents in a targeted fashion.
Probably not. After all, it’s way easier to kidnap an asset in broad daylight and shove them into a van.
Or they can target the asset’s family members to coerce cooperation. Again, very low hanging fruit compared to mind control. Coercion is the best mind control.
This is disheartening to hear. One can only imagine the number of sufferers who have become estranged from loved ones because of similar circumstances. It's not difficult to understand why the loved ones had to cut them out, either. And, of course, since the sufferer ends up estranged from family and loved ones, their situation can more readily snowball into further isolation, self-destruction and increased probability of suicide.
I see this sort of comment every time Snowden comes up on HN. Someone alludes to secret knowledge about him, then makes a dramatic statement that doesn't have any actually-testable component. It's true, the extent of the damage Snowden caused may never be known - even if there wasn't any!
Could you perhaps clarify any of this?
I'm particularly interested by "the Honolulu hackerspace that he later used for his politics". To my knowledge, the only involvement he ever had was to throw a single crypto party there, which none of the attendees have described as being especially political or unusual. Hosting crypto parties at hackerspaces is a pretty standard practice from what I've seen.
Did Snowden do something else political or detrimental at HiCapacity? And does that somehow tie into knowing "a thing or two" about him, given that no one at HiCapacity (or anywhere) seems to have known about the leaks until they were national news?
edit: Seeing as the parent was deleted, I should say that there wasn't anything interesting there. A weird allusion to Snowden screwing up a hackerspace, but no actual substance to justify the mystery.
By damage do you mean indirect political damage stemming from the controversy surrounding Snowden, or direct damage to the US intel programs caused by the actual information that he released? To my knowledge there wasn't really any direct damage at all as a result of Snowden's actions (which is not always true of leakers, see Chelsea Manning)
Personally, I don't doubt that Snowden caused some damage to the IC community. However, I would argue that the benefit to people who would like to live in a modern democracy far outweighs that damage.
I truly believe that the only reason more people are not be outraged by the IC's actions is by not understanding their capabilities. I'm a graduate student in CS and am still amazed at what they could do. There's no way in heck I expect my mother to appreciate the gravity of the danger of such a surveillance state because she can't even begin to comprehend what is possible.
EDIT:
why delete your comments? You should stand by your views even if others disagree. Well, not to the point of being stubborn, but in this case I don't get it.
Since it's gone now, I'll toss in context for those confused: there was yet another comment descending from this one that was also deleted.
It too advanced a weird suggestion that the Hi Capacity makerspace was somehow deeply tied into politics and the intelligence community, and was disrupted by Snowden. (And, of course, offered no support for that claim.)
I had edited/removed the comment for a reason, so your revival of it via inaccurate takeaway isn't particularly appreciated.
In light of the responses, I re-considered whether it was best to keep such information here, but you've simply made things more difficult for me with a false representation of a removed post, that I cannot remove and to which I do not wish to respond.
It was my mistake for deciding to share what was posted here, but it would have been common courtesy to let it go (and not revive the comment in interpretive form), since it was removed by me. You could have contacted me privately to discuss further, as a courtesy to me.
Confused as to the deletion of comments as well. The parent didn't seem to be alluding to any confidential or classified information specifically enough for it to matter, merely its existence, which is obviously already public knowledge
The number of leaks and breaches shows there's a serious problem, but keeping keys secret isn't necessarily implied to be near impossible by consequence of this.
Well, it shows that there is a non-zero probability of the key being leaked or breached. And if the key can open everything, that's a consequence big enough that we need to think seriously about it happening.
"Trust us, we'll keep it secret" has been empirically proven to be not as true as they want us to believe.
Agree 100% about carefully considering consequences of crafting a skeleton key into our most prized technologies. The tech community, at least the most vocal subset in these parts, can keep pushing back against LE's cries for such a key, and it's clear there is merit to such an argument. It just seems to be somewhat provincial from a neutral perspective, however.
Taken from the "other side", it does not seem universally true that generally deployed strong, unbreakable encryption built into "secure" general-purpose commodity hardware is in the best interests of humanity going forward. It seems to be an open question. It was nice to see rational/objective/neutral discourse on HN in the past that considered all sides. But, such a universal perspective seems to be missing of late, and the more recent parochial attitude seems a natural form of pushback, given the current chaos. Hopefully good comes of this.
"Snow Dawg" is currently partaking in thoughtful discussion arguing against NSA's policies on his twitter, if anyone is interested.
What you describe as "neutral" is a false compromise between the reality of technology and math, and the inanity of thinking a backdoor is a good idea.
No, that's not true, the argument for a backdoor isn't purely technical. LE's perspective is almost certainly predicated on a universal (amongst the good) desire to reduce suffering. This part is downplayed or ignored.
Can you prove that there is no such thing as a "perfect" backdoor? Can you show that the existence of a skeleton key introduces risk beyond losing the key? Has this been formally proven?
That might be a good starting point, and I apologize if my understanding is wrong, but can't one build a skeleton key into encryption that cannot be broken with any greater likelihood than otherwise would be possible by compromising the encryption itself? If the surface area of attack is doubled at most, that seems a viable trade-off. Yes, it's potentially a huge SPOF if designed sub-optimally (I'd suspect that there is a way to build something akin to a one-time use set of segregated skeleton keys), but that risk needs management like all risks.
"Can you show that the existence of a skeleton key introduces risk beyond losing the key?" The fact that losing the key is a possibility is risk enough. Once PFS is implemented, the only way (barring crypto attacks) you can break an TLS session secured with it is to have compromised the systems at the time of the communication. A skeleton key now means that there is a possibility of offline decryption with just having a copy of the communication and the skeleton key. This key is handled by humans now, instead of machines and a protocol. That is far more than double the attack surface area.
I'm not anti-NSA, I'd be pro-NSA if they actually helped improve national security -- like by reporting discovered flaws to software makers instead of sitting on them and keeping them quiet in the believe that no one else will discover them.... or worse, supposedly getting (or coercing) companies to install flaws that the NSA can exploit.
Didn't they respond to this already? Spying is what they do, and as far as I recall, the consensus is that they do need, per their mission, to hoard some degree of zero days, but that they should not hoard so tightly. If this understanding is wrong, I apologize.
Amazon is, based on my direct experience, on the list of companies partaking in some level of social shenanigans against US citizens, not completely dissimilar from folks who have overtaken content here on HN, and have done so on reddit in the past.
Seattle is a place full of extraordinarily smart individuals, and the probability that some non-empty subset of those extraordinarily smart individuals partake in sociopathic projects expressed through (and/or enabled by) technology approaches one.
This isn't necessarily related to Jeff Bezos, however.
Your described use case for a "friendly / internal" system has a limited definition in any non-trivial sized organization. It would only apply when all users of the embedded webserver already have root access to that server. This might make sense, for instance, in a small development team with a flat security hierarchy, but would be a red flag, security wise, otherwise.
>Your described use case for a "friendly / internal" system has a limited definition in any non-trivial sized organization.
Facebook is a non-trivial size company that has lots of internal private-facing programs with embedded http connectivity. From that experience, they open sourced Proxygen http library which is one of the links I mentioned in the previous comment.
Also, see the comment from VikingCoder which in turn links to reddit thread mentioning another big company like Google doing similar use cases with http libraries:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15671936
Facebook is a mixed bag as far as being a model of good behavior on many things. The company is founded on irresponsible social principles. For how long did general internal employees have access to users' private data? This is no longer the case, though, correct? Sorry to get OT.
Maybe these libs are well-vetted, after all. My mistake. Thanks for the info.
