In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.
For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.
[...]
On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.
One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.
Telegraph.Co.Uk
If you need information, the Internet offers a wealth of resources. But if you’re hunting down a person or a thing, a computer’s not much help. That may soon change. Electronic tags promise to create what some call the “Internet of things,” in which objects and people are connected through a virtual network.
To see what this future world would be like, a pilot project involving dozens of volunteers in the University of Washington’s computer science building provides the next step in social networking, wirelessly monitoring people and things in a closed environment. Beginning in March, volunteer students, engineers and staff will wear electronic tags on their clothing and belongings to sense their location every five seconds throughout much of the six-story building. The information will be saved to a database, published to Web pages and used in various custom tools. The project is one of the largest experiments looking at wireless tags in a social setting.
The RFID Ecosystem project aims to create a world that many technology experts predict is just on the horizon, said project leader Magda Balazinska, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The project explores the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags in a social environment. The team has installed some 200 antennas in the Paul Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. Early next month researchers will begin recruiting 50 volunteers from about 400 people who regularly use the building.
“Our goal is to ask what benefits can we get out of this technology and how can we protect people’s privacy at the same time,” Balazinska said. “We want to get a handle on the issues that would crop up if these systems become a reality.”
Science Daily
Millions of fingers scurrying over mobile electronic devices probably paused this week as news emerged of a trove of text messages containing flirty and sexually explicit chat between Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and a top aide. Even those engaging in more wholesome dialogue would be wise to wonder: Do text messages disappear – like oral conversations – or are they permanently logged somewhere for potential retrieval – like e-mail usually is?
For standard consumer text-messaging technology, the answer is largely that they disappear. But Kilpatrick’s and Chief of Staff Christine Beatty’s devices employ less-fleeting technology.
“I think people can feel comfortable we’re not storing information that can later be used against them,” Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Erica Sevilla said. “Unless you have something stored on your phone or on a recipients’ phone, it does not stay on our network for a long period.”
AT&T Inc. keeps text messages for up to 72 hours until delivery is successful, spokesman Howard Riefs said. If a message can’t be delivered, it is removed from the system and can’t be retrieved.
Wired
The US, the UK, China and Russia are “endemic surveillance societies”, according to a recent study examining privacy protection around the world that gave the four nations the lowest possible rating.
The 10th annual report showed a global increase in surveillance and a decline in privacy safeguards during 2007, as concerns over immigration and border control continued to dominate national policy agendas.
The 2007 International Privacy Ranking, published by advocacy groups Privacy International of the UK and the Electronic Privacy Information Center in the US gave Britain the “black” or “endemic” ranking for the second year in a row.
Gus Hosein, of Privacy International, justified the UK’s low ranking, noting that the country has the world’s largest network of surveillance cameras, plans for national identity cards rich with personal and biometric information, and little government accountability when personal information is lost.
New Scientist
According to a new international privacy report, governments around the world are increasingly invading the privacy of citizens with surveillance, identification systems, and archiving of private data.
Driven by concern over immigration and border control, countries have been quick to implement database, identity, and fingerprinting systems, according to the 2007 International Privacy Ranking report.
There was also an increase in the trend of governments archiving data on the geographic, communications, and financial records of citizens, as well as enacting legislation intended to increase the reach into individuals’ private lives, the report found.
c|net
Subliminal messages–messages that are processed by our brains but never reach our consciousness–really do influence attitudes and behavior, according to a new study.
Researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem Psychology Department say that their studies indicate that, in general, subliminal messages do indeed influence explicit attitudes and real-life political behavior–a significant extension to what we know about the effects of non-conscious processes.
The studies, led by cognitive scientist Dr. Ran Hassin show that the subliminal presentation of a national symbol affects not only political attitudes, but also voting intentions and actual voting in general elections.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
When Chinese authorities implement a new law this month on the “reincarnation of Living Buddhas,” it will open a new and controversial phase in the looming battle to find a successor for the 72-year-old Dalai Lama.
The Chinese government described the new law as an “important move to institutionalize the management of reincarnation of Living Buddhas,” or lamas, as the monks in senior positions are known in Tibetan Buddhism.
The concept of reincarnation is viewed by non-believers around the world with a considerable degree of scepticism and amusement, but within the context of Tibetan culture it remains a centerpiece in spiritual life.
These Living Buddhas form the core of leadership in Tibetan Buddhism. They constitute a clergy of influential figures who are believed to be continuously reincarnated to pursue their religious work. At the apex of this spiritual elite is the Dalai Lama, which has an unbroken lineage of reincarnations extending 600 years. The current Dalai Lama is considered as the 14th Dalai Lama.
But the new measure has little to do with the esoteric realm of the afterlife and reincarnation. What Beijing is more concerned with has to do with the realm of politics and its political control over the future of Tibet.
The new regulations stipulate the Chinese government’s approval as a requirement in the search and recognition of reincarnated lamas. Though the Dalai Lama is not mentioned directly, the reference to the Tibetan spiritual leader is clear in a provision stating that “the reincarnation of a Living Buddha with a particularly great impact” has to be approved by the top Chinese leaders in Beijing. Otherwise, the government will consider the reincarnation as “illegal or invalid.”
ABC
Published in Activism,
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Organized crime may have brought in more than $2 trillion in revenue last year, about twice all the military budgets in the world combined, according to the “2007 State of the Future” report, published by the Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations, by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon.
The report called organized crime one of the most pressing global issues that needs to be addressed in the next 10 years, along with global warming, terrorism, corruption, unemployment, and income disparities.
But the report noted success in tackling other issues, saying the world has made progress on ending poverty, improving access to education and settling conflicts. It also says the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Africa has begun to level off.
KurzweilAI
A U.S. district judge has struck down a part of the antiterrorism-inspired Patriot Act that requires telephone and Internet service providers to turn over records to the government without telling customers.
Judge Victor Marrero, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled Thursday that the Patriot Act provision that allows the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain ISP and telecom subscribers’ billing, calling and Web surfing records without court approval violates the U.S. Constitution.
Marrero ordered the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to stop issuing so-called national security letters, or NSLs, requiring ISPs to turn over subscriber records. The NSL program prohibited ISPs from telling customers that they were being investigated.
Marrero delayed the order pending a DOJ appeal of his decision.
pcworld
The future of human control is here. United Kingdom’s Merseyside police will be launching a pilotless police “spy drone” next month, with the goals of keeping check and reducing anti-social behavior and public disorder.
The 1-meter wide drone was originally used by the military for scouting. It weighs less than a bag of sugar, according to BBC, and can record images from a height of 500 meters. The hovering spy bots are controlled by remote or pre-programmed GPS navigation system, are extremely quiet and can be fitted with night vision cameras.
dailytech
Internet censorship is growing worldwide, with 26 out of 40 countries blocking or filtering political or social content, a study reported Friday.
The survey carried out by experts at four leading universities found that people in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were often denied access to information about politics, sexuality, culture or religion.
Conducting the first of what is planned to become an annual survey, the experts at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Toronto found that the approach varied according to the country.
For example, South Korea heavily censored only one topic, North Korea, while Iran, China and Saudi Arabia blocked both a wide range of topics and a great deal of content related to those topics.
sydney morning herald
One of the most important bills for working Americans of the last 10 years is likely to go down in defeat, even though Democrats control Congress. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is an anti-union-busting measure that would restore the right to form unions, a right working people have enjoyed mostly on paper since the “Reagan revolution” stacked the deck against workers trying to organize. The House passed the bill last month, but it’s widely expected to be defeated in the Senate, and if it does survive, it will almost certainly fall to George Bush’s veto pen.
If EFCA is defeated, it will carry little or no political cost, largely because America’s corporatocracy has done a bang-up job of framing the debate. A coalition of big business groups conducted a wildly misleading poll, one that gave respondents the (false) idea that the bill will diminish rather than protect workers’ rights—specifically, their right to a fair vote about whether to unionize. They’ve taken that spin and synchronized it across the whole of the conservative communications infrastructure—from business-funded think tanks to right-wing blogs, to the Wall Street Journal editorial page to lawmakers walking the halls of Congress.
alternet
The Bush administration is shocked, shocked, that the firing of a few U.S. attorneys has caused such a stir in Washington. After all, the Oval Office says, the President can choose whomever he wants to prosecute federal cases. But the Supreme Court declared in Berger v. United States that a prosecutor’s job is to see that justice is done, not to politicize justice. The mass ouster of the top prosecutors had more to do with keeping a grip on power—by manipulating voting rights—than with doing justice. And like the Watergate scandal, the evidence points to a cover-up.
This cover-up revolves around efforts by the Bush administration to disenfranchise African-American voters in communities where the vote would likely be close. George W. Bush came to power in 2000 by a razor- thin margin awarded him by the Supreme Court. During the 2004 election, there were allegations of attempts to disenfranchise African-American voters, especially in Ohio. Yet no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African-American or Native American voters from 2001 to 2006.
Instead, the administration instigated efforts that would further disenfranchise these voters. U.S. attorneys were instructed to prosecute “voter fraud” cases. “Voter fraud” has “become almost synonymous with ‘voting while black,’” the New York Times’ Paul Krugman observed. Also, Republican lawmakers enacted voter ID laws which established new hurdles for voters to jump.
alternet
Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx’s proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe’s drops as fertility falls. “Flashmobs” – groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.
This is the world in 30 years’ time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the “future strategic context” likely to face Britain’s armed forces. It includes an “analysis of the key risks and shocks”. Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD’s Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as “probability-based, rather than predictive”.
guardian.co.uk
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