Monday, March 31, 2014
Friday, March 28, 2014
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
US Jazz musicians were drafted into CIA’s MKULTRA
Here is a bit of US history that shows the reach of the CIA’s infamous mind-control program, MKULTRA.
During the 1940s and 50s, it was common knowledge that musicians who were busted for drug use were shipped, or volunteered to go, to Lexington, Kentucky. Lex was the first Narcotics Farm and US Health Dept. drug treatment hospital in the US.
According to diverse sources, here’s a partial list of the reported “hundreds” of jazz musicians who went to Lex: Red Rodney, Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Howard McGhee, Elvin Jones, Zoot Sims, Lee Morgan, Tadd Dameron, Stan Levey, Jackie McLean.
It’s also reported that Ray Charles was there, and William Burroughs, Peter Lorre, and Sammy Davis, Jr.
It was supposed to be a rehab center. A place for drying out.
But it was something else too. Lex was used by the CIA as one of its MKULTRA centers for experimentation on inmates.
The doctor in charge of this mind control program was Harris Isbell. Ironically, Isbell was, at the same time, a member of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs.
Isbell gave LSD and other psychedelics to inmates at Lex.
At Sandoz labs in Switzerland, Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, also synthesized psilocybin from magic mushrooms. The CIA got some of this new synthetic from Hofmann and gave it to Isbell so he could try it out on inmates at Lex.
MKULTRA was a CIA program whose goal was to control minds…in part through the use of drugs.
Isbell worked at Lex from the 1940s through 1963. It is reported that in one experiment, Isbell gave LSD to 7 inmates for 77 consecutive days. At 4 times the normal dosage. That is a chemical hammer of incredible proportions.
To induce inmates to join this drug experiment, they were offered the drug of their choice, which in many cases was heroin. So at a facility dedicated to drying out and rehabbing addicts, addicts were subjected to MKULTRA experiments and THEN a re-establishment of their former habit.
Apparently as many as 800 different drugs were sent to Isbell by the CIA or CIA fronts to use on patients at Lex. Two of the fronts? The US Navy and the US National Institute of Mental Health.
In another MKULTRA experiment at Lex, nine men were strapped down on tables. They were injected with psilocybin. Lights were beamed at their eyes–a typical mind control component.
During Isbell’s tenure, no one knows how many separate experiments he ran on the inmates. No one knows what other mind-control programming he attempted to insert along with the drugs.
As I say, Lex was the main stop for drying out for NY jazz musicians. How many of them were taken into these MKULTRA programs?
As Martin Lee explains in his book, Acid Dreams, “It became an open secret…that if the [heroin] supply got tight [on the street], you could always commit yourself to Lexington, where heroin and morphine were doled out as payment if you volunteered for Isbell’s whacky drug experiments. (Small wonder Lexington had a return rate of 90%.)”
A June 15, 1999, Counterpunch article by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, “CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb: Pusher, Assassin & Pimp— US Official Poisoner Dies,” contains these quotes on Dr. Isbell:
“Gottlieb also funded the experiments of Dr. Harris Isbell. Isbell ran the Center for Addiction Research in Lexington, Kentucky. Passing through Isbell’s center was a captive group of human guinea pigs in the form of a steady stream of black heroin addicts. More than 800 different chemical compounds were shipped from Gottlieb to Lexington for testing on Isbell’s patients.
“Perhaps the most infamous experiment came when Isbell gave LSD to seven black men for seventy-seven straight days. Isbell’s research notes indicates that he gave the men ‘quadruple’ the ‘normal’ dosages. The doctor marveled at the men’s apparent tolerance to these remarkable amounts of LSD. Isbell wrote in his notes that ‘this type of behavior is to be expected in patients of this type.’
“In other Gottlieb-funded experiment at the Center, Isbell had nine black males strapped to tables, injected them with psylocybin, inserted rectal thermometers, had lights shown in their eyes to measure pupil dilation and had their joints whacked to test neural reactions.”
Source Activist Post
Microsoft and Others Reserve Right To Read Customers' Emails
Microsoft has asserted its right to read customers’ emails, according to a story on CNN. Last week the company admitted in federal court documents that it had hacked its way into a journalist’s Hotmail account to stop a leak of some proprietary software. The company said it was justified in doing so because the software, had it leaked, would have empowered hackers to exploit security vulnerabilities and put other customers at risk.
"In this case, we took extraordinary actions based on the specific circumstances," said John Frank, a Microsoft lawyer.
According to the FBI, Microsoft learned in 2012 that an ex-employee had leaked the software to an anonymous blogger. Fearing that the blogger could could sell the information, company attorneys approved “content pulls” from the blogger’s email accounts. Under such a situation law enforcement agencies would be required to obtain a warrant. Microsoft claimed, though, that its terms of service allow the company to access information in customers’ accounts “in the most exceptional circumstances.”
"Microsoft clearly believes that the users' personal data belongs to Microsoft, not the users themselves,” said Ginger McCall of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. McCall believes users would be upset if they knew what the terms of service of most email providers actually allowed.
"This is part of the broader problem with privacy policies," she said. "There are hidden terms that the users don't actually know are there. If the terms were out in the open, people would be horrified by them.”
The problem extends beyond Microsoft according to the Guardian. Apple, Google, and Yahoo all have similar policies. A recent story quoted excerpts from each company policy.
Google, for instance, requires that users "acknowledge and agree that Google may access … your account information and any content associated with that account… in a good faith belief that such access … is reasonably necessary to … protect against imminent harm to the … property … of Google.”
The problem is that most people don’t read the terms when signing up for a new service said Charlie Howe of Skyhigh Networks.
“I would guess that most people don’t actually read the full terms and conditions before using a new application, and they would probably be surprised by what they are actually agreeing to when they click the ‘accept’ button on certain cloud services,” he said.
According to the CNN story, Microsoft, recognizing the topic is sensitive, has announced that it will bring in a former federal judge to review cases in the future where it may need to access customer information.
Sources: CNN, The Guardian
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Facebook’s Facial-Recognition Tech Is Now Better Than the FBI’s. Here’s Why That’s Scary
The giant social network just announced it can recognize your face with 97 percent accuracy
Facebook and the FBI are engaged in an arms race to create technology capable of recognizing someone just by looking at a picture of their face.
Facebook is winning that battle, which provides a new incentive for the government to use the social network’s data for surveillance-related purposes.
This week, Facebook announced DeepFace, a new piece of facial-recognition technology developed by an in-house team of developers and researchers. One striking part of the announcement was the claim that the software was now up to 97.25 percent accurate. Using “networks of a simulated neurons to spot patterns in data,” Facebook just became the best facial-identifier in the world.
Which is interesting, really, because the FBI—through its Next Generation Identification (NGI) program—has spent $1.2 billion of its own on facial-recognition technology. But their facial-technology program only works about 80 percent of the time.
“It does imply that Facebook’s facial-recognition technology may be farther along than the FBI’s,” says Jeramie Scott, who serves on the national security counsel at the D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Centers, or EPIC, a group that’s known for pushing for privacy rights.
To be sure, Facebook and the FBI claim to have very different purposes for the facial-recognition technology. Facebook wants to get better at tagging people in photos, data that be sold to advertisers. (If someone uploads a picture of you hanging out in a Gap store, for instance, that’s valuable information to a clothing retailer.)
The FBI, on the other hand, plans to roll out its facial-recognition technology this summer to local law enforcement agencies around the country. It claims the software will help identify suspects in crimes. For instance, if surveillance video captures the face of a man robbing a bank, the NGI program will theoretically be able to comb through mugshots and Department of Motor Vehicles records to match the face and find the suspect.
The FBI has explicitly pointed out that it will only be drawing photos from national repositories—i.e. government sources. “Query photos and photos obtained from social networking sites, surveillance cameras, and similar sources are not used to populate the national repository,” the FBI recently noted.
(Deepface)
But the fear, of course, is that the FBI will find ways of tapping into Facebook’s data—especially now that Facebook has become so proficient at identifying people based on their faces. ”There’s always the potential that the government will leverage the data that’s collected by the private sector,” Scott adds.
Facial recognition is difficult to get right, especially using grainy photos captured by surveillance cameras. But more and more businesses are spending resources to develop better facial-recognition systems. Lockheed Martin, for instance, recently announced it was spending more to become “a leader in biometric solutions.” It’s also worth noting that the government has yet to regulate private and commercial facial recognition endeavors.
Regardless, the implication is clear: We’re moving toward a post-anonymity future. Whether its Facebook or the FBI, facial-recognition technology makes its possible for both the private and public sectors to track your movements—whether it’s for profit or surveillance.