15. DARPA was responsible for the
creation and weaponization of Agent Orange during the Vietnam
War
Back in 1961, when DARPA was called
ARPA, the agency ran a toxicology branch at Fort Detrick, where
it spearheaded one of the most controversial weapons programs in
U.S. history.
Project Agile utilized
Agent Orange
as a part of their highly classified defoliation and food crop
poisoning efforts in the jungles of Vietnam.
Their use of Agent Orange, which was
manufactured by nine wartime government contractors, including
Monsanto, may be responsible for cancer, nervous disorders, and
skin cancer in
2.8 million servicemen who returned from Vietnam.
The U.S. defoliation program
directly killed about
400,000 Vietnamese, caused half a million children to be
born with birth defects, and may be the cause of cancer in over
2 million more Vietnamese people.
President John F. Kennedy signed off
on DARPA's costly, deadly and, ultimately, ineffective program.
14. Four nuclear bombs were detonated
during the Cuban Missile Crisis
It's widely
believed
that nuclear weapons were not used during the Cuban Missile
Crisis.
Contrarily, with Eisenhower's test ban failing, the United
States actually detonated two nuclear weapons - code-named
Checkmate and Bluegill Triple Prime - in space at the height of tension in October of 1962. Then they tested two more bombs.
ARPA, at the behest of Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara, launched this effort to test an
atmospheric nuclear defense shield known as the
Christofilos
effect.
13. DARPA ostracized any scientist who
discussed ethics or morality with regard to the use of nuclear
weapons
After the horror of witnessing the
first hydrogen bomb test, which, in its initial blast had many
scientists afraid the atmosphere was catching on fire, Robert
Oppenheimer was forced into exile after expressing moral
concerns over continued nuclear weapons development.
Thereafter, it became official DARPA
policy to not discuss ethical issues related to the use of
nuclear weapons in warfare.
[Source:
The Pentagon's Brain: An
Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military
Research Agency.]
12. DARPA scientists drew up plans to
nuke the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War
Then Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara called on
the Jason scientists - at one time a
dominant and prolific division within DARPA - to determine
whether it was possible to take out the Ho Chi Minh Trail with
nuclear weapons.
Military leaders considered the
disabling of this important strategic path the preeminent way
for the United States to fatally weaken the VietCong insurgency.
However, in this rare instance of
restraint, the Jason scientists determined it was impractical to
use nuclear weapons for this purpose.
They stated:
"At least one TNW [tactical
nuclear weapon] is required for each target, and the targets
are mostly small and fleeting. A reasonable guess at the
order of magnitude of weapons requirements… would be ten
per day or 3000 per year."
11. DARPA developed weapons
specifically for the purpose of brutally incapacitating anti-war
demonstrators
At the peak of the anti-Vietnam War
fervor in 1968, then-ARPA scientists looked for methods of
comprehensively dispersing the crowds that gathered in huge
numbers to peacefully protest the war.
The research and implementation of
these methods included,
-
tear gas
-
phosgene oxide (which can
cause temporary blindness)
-
anticholinergics (which block nerve
impulses)
-
emetic agents (chemicals that induce vomiting)
-
non-lethal grenades
-
poisoned tranquilizing darts
-
lasers
-
eardrum-shattering loud noises
-
tagging (using markings
only visible in ultraviolet light) for later apprehension
"Nonlethal weapons are generally
intended to prevent an individual from engaging in
undesirable acts," wrote the authors of a seminal report,
which was only recently declassified.
The final crowd control effort,
which persists today, sanctioned the upgrading of state police
arsenals with military-grade equipment.
The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe
Streets Act of 1968 created the Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration (LEAA), a federal agency whose sole purpose was
to militarize local police forces.
[Source: The Pentagon's Brain: An
Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military
Research Agency.]
10. In 2008, the NSA and DARPA
collaborated for a covert data mining campaign called Project
Reynard, which monitored millions of World of Warcraft users
Project Reynard came at
the first peak of MMO gaming and sought to track the online
behavior of 10 million monthly subscribers to the World of
Warcraft.
This program wasn't revealed to the
public until 2013, when
Edward Snowden disclosed top secret
documents related to governmental abuses of power.
DARPA scientists
configured a Video Analysis and Content Extraction tool, as well
as something called Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination, so
that Reynard was,
"automatically detecting
suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."
9. DARPA's anti-polio vaccination
campaign exposed millions of Americans to the "cryptic human
infection" of monkey virus
In the late 1950s and early 1960s,
the Jason scientists were tasked with biological warfare
defense.
Their research produced a highly
classified controversial
vaccination campaign that exposed 98
million people to the "cryptic human infection" of monkey virus,
known as Simian virus 40 (SV40).
No one was told of the risk and,
even today, rancorous debate over the extent of the danger
persists. Scientists have reported that the SV40 virus is found
in cancerous human tumors.
Writing on the nature of a stealth
virus, or 'silent loads,' in biological warfare, one Jason
microbiologist wrote:
"The basic idea behind a stealth
virus is to produce a tightly regulated, cryptic viral
infection, using a vector that can enter and spread in human
cells, remaining resident for lengthy periods without
detectable harm… [a population could be] slowly
pre-infected with a stealth virus over an extended period,
possibly years, and then synchronously triggered."
[Source: The Pentagon's
Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret
Military Research Agency.]
8. DARPA's Defense Sciences Office was
controlled by military transhumanist Michael Goldblatt, a
McDonald's employee
Michael Goldblatt, who
believes that humans will end up controlling their own evolution
with technology, came to DARPA in 1999 with a vision for
military-based transhumanism.
His plans included super-soldiers
donning exoskeletons and the use of biotech to manufacture pain
vaccines and rapid blood clotting for "rapid healing" troops.
He also wanted to create the "24/7
soldier," who requires little to no sleep on the battlefield. He
also happened to have served as chief science officer and vice
president of research for McDonald's.
Notably, in 2012, Cannabis Science
appointed Goldblatt to its
Scientific Advisory Board.
7. DARPA'S Dark Winter war game
simulated a biological terrorist attack and may have contributed
to a biowarfare hysteria that paved the way for the Iraq war
Dark Winter was a fictitious
exercise developed by four organizations overseen by DARPA, who
wanted to create a
hypothetical biological terrorist attack and then assess
military reactions to the scenario.
The premise, which was pitched to
Dick Cheney in 2001, before 9/11, involved a smallpox outbreak
in Oklahoma City.
The game played out over thirteen
days, during which time the disease spread to 25 states and 15
other countries. With no response or vaccine available, a
million people die within weeks.
As a result, the Congressional
Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction
Proliferation and Terrorism stated,
"To date, the U.S. government
has invested most of its nonproliferation efforts and
diplomatic capital in preventing nuclear terrorism. The
commission believes that it should make the more likely
threat -
bioterrorism - a higher priority."
Since Dark Winter, the government
has spent more than $60 billion on biodefense.
This number, of course, doesn't
tabulate the cost of the war in Iraq, the justification of which
was greatly buoyed by fear-mongering over Saddam Hussein's
fictitious chemical and biological warfare capacities.
6. DARPA sponsored bio-surveillance
program Bio-ALIRT, which collected the medical records of
millions of Americans without their knowledge or consent
Even before 9/11 sent government
agencies into Orwellian overdrive, DARPA had been leveraging a
surveillance program known as
Bio-ALIRT, for Bio-Event Advanced Leading Indicator
Recognition Technology.
Supercomputers did the job, scanning
all available databases of medical records of American citizens.
5. Under the umbrella of a system
known as Total Information Awareness, DARPA spearheaded many of
the surveillance programs abused by the NSA
DARPA's Total Information Awareness
concept created a veritable buffet of advanced surveillance and
data mining programs, many of which ultimately were folded into
NSA's PRISM.
We
now know that
PRISM culled citizens' personal data from companies like,
...and was later leaked by
whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Total Information Awareness programs
include:
-
Evidence Extraction and Link
Discovery program (EELD)
Sole purpose is to gather as
much information about both terror suspects and average
American citizens as possible, using "phone records,
computer searches, credit card receipts, parking
receipts, books checked out of the library, films
rented, and more." Goal is to assess megadata on 285
million people a day in real time.
-
Scalable Social Network
Analysis (SSNA)
Program "monitors telephone calls,
conference calls, and ATM withdrawals … also sought to
develop a far more invasive surveillance technology."
-
Activity Recognition and
Monitoring (ARM)
With England's CCTV surveillance
cameras as a model, ARM created a massive database of
people going about their everyday lives. Using advanced
facial recognition software, the program highlighted any
behavior that was outside the realm of a preprogrammed
"ordinary," the definition of which remains classified.
-
Deep Exploration and
Filtering of Text (DEFT)
Operating on a 28 million
dollar budget, this program utilizes advanced computer
algorithms to analyze text-based messages in all shapes
and forms, from text messages to reports, with the aim
being to comprehend "implied and hidden meanings through
probabilistic inference." The full use of DEFT in the
United States is classified.
-
Nexus 7
With a classified
budget, this particularly murky program studies and
tracks social network content. First used in Afghanistan
in a defense capacity, when aimed at domestic networks
the use of the program is a mystery.
[Source: The Pentagon's Brain: An
Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military
Research Agency.]
4. DARPA'S "culture-centric warfare"
program conscripted social scientists and anthropologists into
the Iraq war as mercenaries
Operating under the idea that
anthropologists would facilitate a more humane war effort,
DARPA'S
Human Terrain System sought to promote "honorable warfare"
in its Iraq counterinsurgency efforts.
This lead to the gruesome death of
at least
one social scientist. On the whole, the program seems to
have muddled the already arcane purpose of combat forces in Iraq
with a 'hearts and minds' type of ideology.
It reminded some analysts of
internal military propaganda from the Vietnam War.
"After [Human Terrain System]
training,"
DARPA stated, "soldiers will be able to approach and
engage strangers in unfamiliar social environments, orient
to unfamiliar patterns of behavior, recover from social
mistakes, de-escalate conflict, rigorously practice
transition in and out of force situations and engage in the
process of discovering and adapting to previously unknown
'rules of the game' encountered in social engagements."
3. DARPA believes the future of war
involves animal cyborgs and insect-inspired drone technology
The Stealthy Insect Sensor Project
is part of a long-standing effort to use bees in war,
particularly as bomb locators.
It started in 1999 and evolved into
the development of insect-inspired drones, which are known as micro
air vehicles (MAVs).
Eventually, DARPA plans for its "biohybrids"
to be part animal, part machine cyborgs, which, according to
Annie Jacobsen, author of 'The Pentagon's Brain
- An
Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military
Research Agency', will,
"fly, swim, crawl, walk, run, and swarm."
The science fueling this futuristic
vision is nanobiology. Most of the nanobiology applications
DARPA is developing are classified.
However, in an interview
with
Coast to Coast AM, Jacobsen said,
"DARPA has already succeeded in
creating a rat that will be steered by remote control by
implanting an electrode in its brain.
"And it's done the same thing
with a moth which is really remarkable because the
scientists implanted the electrodes in the pupa stage of the
moth when it was still a worm!
And then it transformed into
having wings, and those tiny little micro-sensors
transformed with the moth and the DARPA scientists were able
to steer that moth.
"Imagine following that idea
through - DARPA is moving toward engineering humans for
war."
2. DARPA's Narrative Networks program
developed classified techniques used to manipulate trust in
humans
For its
Narrative Networks (N2)
program,
DARPA collaborated with a CIA agency called the Intelligence
Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) to develop methods of
overwriting messages in the human mind.
In an article for
phys.org entitled "DARPA looking to master propaganda via
Narrative Networks," the program was described as having two
parts:
-
first, to understand what
happens in the human mind when someone sees or hears a
message
-
second, to figure out how to
control how the brain interprets the message
One researcher
described Narrative Networks as an attempt to,
"detect narrative influence…
[for the] prevention of negative behavioral outcomes… and
generation of positive behavioral outcomes, such as building
trust."
"The government is already
trying to control the message, so why not have the science
to do it in a systematic way?"
1. Hunter-killer robots, guided by
advanced artificial intelligence, will wage the wars of the
future
Despite the grand mystery of exactly
what DARPA is currently working on, which of course is deeply
classified, there have been relatively unambiguous signals that
it involves artificial intelligence and the outsourcing of
military operations to machines.
The future of war will see the rise
of unmanned autonomous drones, referred to as hunter-killer
robots.
In 2011, the Defense Department
released a document entitled "Unmanned
Systems Integrated Roadmap," which laid out a cursory
overview of the next couple decades.
It unequivocally states there will
be fully self-governing autonomous machines… soon. Currently,
DARPA is working on creating an artificial brain.
According to the undersecretary of
defense Ashton B. Carter in 2010:
"Dramatic progress in supporting
technologies suggests that unprecedented, perhaps unimagined
degrees of autonomy can be introduced into current and
future military systems."
