They are also one of the biggest contributors to journalists in the world. The CIA is responsible for us being able to differentiate between truth and falsehoods so easily, and without effort.
That is underselling the CIA. They can also detect when statements are true but simultaneously also Russian disinformation. That is a difficult skill to master - many ordinary people that I know can only manage to pick one.
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.
100% agree. I will forever be grateful to them for helping me so easily and without effort discern between likely truths and false narratives imposed upon me by state-sponsored actors trying to shift public opinion in order to achieve their clandestine geopolitical goals.
> The CIA is responsible for us being able to differentiate between truth and falsehoods so easily, and without effort.
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.
I think that's a fair point. When CIA officials stated unequivocally that Hunters laptop was Russian disinformation. We knew we were getting the real deal.
Well you know, common sense would be looking at Hitler and not making the same mistake. Gonna need to have some faith here, although I always thought the best season finale would him be stealing air force one to fly to his handler in Moscow to party with Steve Segal
I believe this sort of comment really epitomises the good the CIA had done to society. Knowing the truth is just instinctive to large swathes of the US population.
Unfortunate historical comparison to Hitler, who they actually did put in jail, but he got treated as a star guest and wrote his book there coming out to a big second act in his political career.
I’m not American and the fact that you can’t see the difference between hunter Biden and Trumps kids holding office - is so mind boggling stupid I fear for the future of your country.
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.
I think sarcasm is a fantastic way to get people to consider their beliefs. Seeing them uttered will make people actually consider them. Perhaps I overestimate people. But the amount of people who have deleted their comments in support of my post suggest that at least someone has second thoughts.
Both can be true at the same time. On the one hand yes intelligence services attempt to manipulate public opinion at home and broad. On the other, they know that independent reporting in and of oppressive opposing states undermines those states, and so they promote it.
> 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.
CIA were laggers in psyops war between West and East/Russia for decades. It's why nobody, even experts, can detect their psyops.
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.
Jack Dorsey recently tweeted that the CIA, FBI and NSA should be abolished. Elon Musk and other billionaires have voiced similar opinions so it is not an uncommon view among a section of the US elites.
It would be interesting to see what the short-term and long-term results of that would be.
Why would you trust a billionaire on a matter like this? Do you think they have your best interest at heart?
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.
It was merely an observation that a certain section of the US elites now want to do away with CIA, FBI and NSA. Has nothing to do with "trusting billionaires".
My issue is that they (Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, "certain elites") are invoked as if their opinion is a valid one and in support of the writer's position.
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.
Knowles really knows their shit on the microphone front. I worked with them a few times when I still worked in consumer tech.
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.
A list made by an independent third party would be a lot more interesting. For some reason, the CIA left out their pioneering use of LSD for behavioral modification, and their use of trained pigeons to attempt to spy on the USSR.
Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley [0] is worth reading, an in-depth introduction to the crucial contributions to the development of semiconductor during the Cold War made by secret military projects.
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.
More people need to read this Steve Blank presentation.
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.
> magically appeared out of some pacifist commune in Berkeley. [...] Not true in the slightest.
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.
I agree with everything you just wrote. I find that a lot of discourse about the military industrial complex gets very black/white - to the point that a lot of people seem willfully ignorant of the ways that the MIC has enabled their livelihoods.
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.
I like to point out that computers are war machines. First use of computer: help win WWII. Second use of computer: simulate atomic bombs. And so it goes...
Let’s not forget such modern inventions as overthrowing democratically elected governments and replacing them with brutal dictators who violate everything the United States purports to stand for.
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.
A significant amount of the tech that comes out of silicon valley has been either requested, developed for or funded indirectly by their VC [1] I would wager some people don't even know they have several items created at their behest operating in their data-centers. Doing security reviews for the hardware can be fun. Any push-back will result in meeting members growing exponentially in most cases. I'm not mentioning vendor names but some of them also get really nervous if they believe you have super-user access to their devices. Some of them are here on HN. The In-Q-Tel website [2] can give you an idea of some of the less obscure vendors.
Like, I genuinely want to know if they stumbled upon some interesting discoveries in the last decades which I don't know. No need to repeat all the atrocities and crimes they did, which I already know.
74 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] threadhttps://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.
What are they going to do? Empty an entire cell block just for one guy?
If (and that's a BIG if) he's ever sentenced to anything, it will be like gps monitoring at most. Again, that's IF he sentenced to anything.
I have no faith the US justice system will be able to convict him, as a side note. He's just too famous to have real consequences; that's how we do.
Edit: these statements are not to be seen as pro-trump in an fashion. They are just common sense.
Society at large has seemed to decide that a certain level of celebrity does, in fact, mean you're above the law.
Proof: Jay-z stabbed somebody. Alec Baldwin punched a guy over a parking space I think. Chris Brown, well, being Chris Brown.
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
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569184
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.
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.
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.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R0017002...
[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.