CIA Contributions to Modern Technology
cia.gov
cia.gov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-cias-most-highly-...
Edit: I do not understand the downvotes. This blog series was once submitted to Hacker News with 188 upvotes, 48 comments, and a largely positive response [1]. The topic is well-researched by Steve Blank to allow him making a presentation at the Computer History Museum. Recognizing the roles played by military projects in semiconductor history does not imply that the military-industrial complex is the greatest blessing of humanity ever, just like recognizing the scientific contributions of Manhattan Project to nuclear science does not mean that a nuclear war is great to have. To the contrary, one is free to criticize the uncomfortable violence behind today's technology that is not often discussed, like many authors did in recent years.
There's a ton of people on HN who post about their roles in software engineering as though their internet-spawned livelihood just magically appeared out of some pacifist commune in Berkeley.
Not true in the slightest. Almost every piece of tech that the tech community builds on - semiconductors, the internet, satellite mapping, GPS - was paid for first by the military, who needed it back when nobody ever thought there'd be a commercial use for it.
We owe the military industrial complex a bit of a debt in that regard, even if we don't like to admit it.
My point of view is that both are true to a certain degree. Many Berkeley pacifists indeed did pioneering work in the history of personal computing. But it's also true that many were largely supported by the military-industrial complex, more often than not with direct funding. Both parties were well aware of the dual-use nature of the research output.
For example, cryptographer Whitfield Diffie chose to do his seminal research on public-key crypto, partially to avoid the Vietnam War draft (and according to a book by John Markoff, the interviewer accepted him partially because he was a hippie familiar with LSD). In spite of the military funding, he accepted the project because he was personally a strong believer on the civilian use of cryptography to protect civil liberty from state overreach ever since - famously attacking the weakening of the DES cipher to 56 bits under NSA influence in the 1980s.
This coexistence remains to this day. Many innovative research papers in infosec are still funded by DARPA and US Navy Research Lab, even though quite a few researchers involved are personally critical of the US government's infosec policies. This is often interpreted as a conspiracy to people who have just realized it, but it's a counterintuitive but logical outcome that has already occurred since the 1970s.
The MIC certainly isn't all good. But it's kept a lot of people fed and generated a ton of research and technology that has, on net, made the world a better place.
The reality is a lot more nuanced than most of these comments lead you to believe.
Knowles Electronics is a firm that has had decades of work in designing and manufacturing tiny microphones, mostly for government agencies they will not talk about.
That microscopic surface-mount unit in your smartphone was the result of all that development.
They're making bank selling packaged PDM mics for voice controlled stuff these days. I'm sure they're just mass marketing stuff that they sold to the Agency 20-30 years ago.
Does this page really have any kind of measurable impact on swaying options from negative to positive?
> We’re proud to share stories of the employees, operations, and missions that keep our Nation safe
Hard to do that job if you were not convinced.
[1] - https://mattermark.com/q-tel-cias-vc-arm-busy-years/
[2] - https://www.iqt.org/
The US military and intelligence agencies get so many strong reactions out of people, for so many different reasons.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R0017002...
It’s quite a technological feat to somehow support US ideals by doing the exact opposite. As a boy I always marveled at how they pulled it off. I suppose to this day I’m seeking an explanation of the technology.
facebook, google, cameras on both sides of the phone, non-removable phone batteries, tracking via ads....
any more?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/...
It would be interesting to see what the short-term and long-term results of that would be.
Jack Dorsey supports RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign.
Even if Jack Dorsey doesn't have a nefarious goal in mind, his judgment is questionable. For instance, in the Twitter transaction he said “Elon is the singular solution I trust.” “I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness”
The way these people acted during Covid should destroy any hope in them. Ofc. that is if you weren't part of the laptop-class for whom it was just a vacation, while they were being served by the underclass.
A strongman is not the answer.
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3138630/why-do-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
The best part of the modern internet is that it seems to have fatally wounded the ability of the US lie-industrial complex to stay out of the limelight. It is getting a lot easier to keep track of people like Brennan or Clapper. They've got relatively weak attempts at respectability like this article and they're up against a tide of well deserved contempt from the greater internet population who seem to have a mild preference for facts and truth.
Are you sure about that? The CIA has been successfully conducting psyops for decades, on both US citizens and abroad, and it can go undetected by even experts in the matter, let alone regular citizens. That's the whole point of the operation: influence public opinion without leaking the source of the information.
So unless the information is coming straight from a CIA official, I doubt that truth and falsehood is so easily discernible.
Nobody is invulnerable to information warfare. We can just be skeptical in varying degrees, which can sometimes minimize how influenceable we are, but ultimately it's impossible to discern fact from fiction if your information sources have been polluted by propaganda. The internet is the greatest psyops weapon ever invented.
Because every single random opinion seems to be held by somebody. (So, if you state something, it is possible that you hold that literal whatever opinion.)
And because statements without justification are like random statements - also with relevance to the topic. Some agents in fact use the proposal of any odd idea as desensitization, towards atrophy of judgement.
CIA were laggers in psyops war between West and East/Russia for decades. It's why nobody, even experts, can detect their psyops.
Lol the CIA actively engages in media manipulation.
Clearly it was Putin who was such a madlad that he destroyed his greatest bargaining chip in the Nordstream pipeline, and setoff a chain of events that will both destroy EU's economy and the threat it proved to US hegemony, while simultaneously ensuring that EU buys its LNG from US.
Why is Putin helping us ? What a madlad.
So is the church. /s