From: mcactivism@yahoogroups.com on behalf of January Steele [januarysteele@yahoo.com] Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 7:05 PM To: mcactivism@yahoogroups.com Subject: [mcactivism] Project Acoustic Kitty I had to track this down.  From: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/01/primarysources.htm Project Acoustic Kitty Included in a passel of CIA documents recently declassified through a Freedom of Information Act request was a heavily redacted memo from 1967 titled "[deleted] Views on Trained Cats [deleted] for [deleted] Use." Evidently the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology spent several years and (supposedly) millions of dollars surgically enhancing—and then training—a cat to become an organic eavesdropping device. It didn't work. Operatives "slit the cat open, put batteries in him, wired him up," according to what Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, told the London Daily Telegraph not long ago. "The tail was used as an antenna ... They found he would walk off the job when he got hungry, so they put another wire in to override that." Finally, they "put him out of the van, and a taxi comes and runs him over." The memo concludes that in a "real foreign situation" the cat "would not be practical." Nevertheless, We have satisfied ourselves that it is indeed possible [deleted]. This is in itself a remarkable scientific achievement. Knowing that cats can indeed be trained to move short distances [deleted] we see no reason to believe that a [deleted] cat can not be similarly trained to approach [deleted] ... The work done on this problem over the years reflects great credit on the personnel who guided it, particularly [deleted], whose energy and imagination could be models for scientific pioneers. —The National Security Archive (www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB54/) --- On Sun, 11/16/08, January Steele wrote: From: January Steele Subject: Re: [mcactivism] Cyborg Insects To: "mcactivism@yahoogroups.com" Date: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 5:37 PM I read about that CAT spy in "The Atlantic" a few years ago (when my targetting was severe)   It said that the project was a failure because the cat would be all wired but then would go get something to eat when it was supposed to be spying.  I also remember a lot of the article included reports that were redacted.   --- On Sun, 11/16/08, Julianne McKinney wrote: From: Julianne McKinney Subject: Re: [mcactivism] Cyborg Insects To: "mcactivism@yahoogro ups.com" Date: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 9:29 AM Get out the bug bomb, fly swatters and rat traps.  I remember reading about the CIA's efforts at wiring a cat for surveillance purposes, many years ago.  They spent a lot of money on the project and, after releasing the cat, thinking it would head home, the cat was run over.  So, now DARPA wants to control the direction of rats and other animals.  Fine.  As long as they're busy with animals, they can't afford to concentrate on us.  Money and credit are in relatively short supply these days, in case no one's noticed. Julianne ____________ _________ _________ __ From: idsyzygus To: mcactivism@yahoogro ups.com Sent: Sunday, November 16, 2008 12:09:29 PM Subject: [mcactivism] Cyborg Insects THE next time a moth alights on your window sill, watch what you say. Sure, it may look like an innocent visitor, irresistibly drawn to the light in your room, but it could actually be a spy - one of a new generation of cyborg insects with implants wired into their nerves to allow remote control of their movement. Be warned, flesh-and-blood bugs may soon live up to their name. It's not just insects that could be used as snoops. Researchers have already developed remote control systems for rats, pigeons and even sharks. The motivation is simple: why labour for years to build robots that imitate the ways animals move when you can just plug into living creatures and hijack systems already optimised by millions of years of evolution? "There's a long history of trying to develop micro-robots that could be sent out as autonomous devices, but I think many engineers have realised that they can't improve on Mother Nature," says insect neurobiologist John Hildebrand at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Furthermore, animals' sensory abilities far outstrip the vast majority of artificial sensors. Sharks, moths and rats, for example, have amazing olfactory systems that allow them to detect the faintest traces of chemicals. And if you can hide your control system within your cyborg's body, it would be virtually indistinguishable from its unadulterated kin - the perfect spy. The cyborg concept drifted back into science fiction for a few decades, until 2002 when a team announced that they had developed a cyborg rat whose movement could be controlled remotely (New Scientist, 4 May 2002, p 6). The team led by John Chapin at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn, implanted electrodes in the rat's brain which apparently mimicked the sensation that its left or right whiskers had been brushed. They then trained the rat to respond to the electrical stimuli. For example, if the rat turned right when the brain region associated with its right whiskers was pulsed, then reward centres in its brain were electrically stimulated. Linda Hermer-Vasquez at the University of Florida in Gainesville later joined the project to train the cyborg rat to identify specific scents, such as humans or explosives, to demonstrate that it could be used in search-and-rescue missions to find people trapped under rubble, for example, or to sniff out bombs. To give the animal's operator a rat's-eye view, the most advanced generation of cyborg rats were kitted out with video-camera backpacks. These souped-up rats were trained to board a rolling carrier so that they could be easily transported to the site of their mission. To test the system, the team allowed a rat to descend from the carrier and remotely steered it to the area they wanted searched for traces of an explosive. Once in the correct area, they switched off their remote control. "When the rat realised that it was no longer being controlled, it went into odour-sniffing mode," says Hermer- Vasquez. Within a few minutes, the rat had successfully identified the source of the scent. They repeated the test several times, with the same result. The team steered a rat by remote-control to the area they wanted searched for traces of explosives It is easy to see if a rat in the lab has found the source of a target scent, but in the field the team would need a way of getting remote confirmation that their cyborg rat had accomplished its mission and found a target. To achieve this, they first identified the neural signals that rats generate when they come across a scent they are trained to find. The researchers began to develop another brain implant to pick up these neural signals and a transmitter attached to the backpack to relay them to "mission control" (New Scientist, 25 September 2004, p 21). Unfortunately, progress slowed in 2005 when the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) stopped funding the research. However, Hermer-Vasquez says the Israeli government has since asked the team to apply for a patent in Israel so the government can license the technology to use cyborg rats in search-and-rescue missions. The patent is pending. Chapin's team now plans to transfer its technology to birds, where it could be useful for surveillance. They won't be the first, though. Last year, a team led by Su Xuecheng at the Shandong University of Science and Technology in Qingdao, reported implanting electrodes in the brains of pigeons which allowed them to direct the birds up, down, left or right via wireless signals from a laptop. In another, now-defunct DARPA project, Jelle Atema of Boston University, Massachusetts, showed he could control the direction of a small shark - called a spiny dogfish - using a brain implant to stimulate either its left or right olfactory centre. The shark turned to follow the phantom odour (New Scientist, 1 March 2006, p 30). continue: http://www.newscien tist.com/ article/mg197264 61.800-the- cyborg-animal- spies-hatching- in-the-lab. html [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ -- To post: mcactivism@yahoogroups.com To unsubscribe: mcactivism-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mcactivism/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mcactivism/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:mcactivism-digest@yahoogroups.com mailto:mcactivism-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: mcactivism-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! 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