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Operation Acoustic Kitty
rockville writes: "Remember the Cold War, when intelligence agencies had no oversight and a blank check? Now that those days are back, here's a good object lesson: the Chicago Sun-Times has details about Operation Acoustic Kitty, a CIA program to wire a cat to spy on the Soviet Union. Feel free to be either shocked at the depravity or shocked at the stupidity. The first prototype is also a nominee for Worst Presentation Ever." Hmmm. Last time I posted a story about cats, I got angry email from cat-lovers. Let's see what happens this time.
They say to give the CIA more free reign over what they do, that it would make them more effective. This only solidifies my doubts. They're no more effective, it seems - just have free reign to do stupid things. Like kill cats. Or fail to assassinate Fidel Castro how many times...?
But we know about those, so perhaps I am incorrect. Perhaps we only hear about what they do wrong; after all, the failure means that it is no threat to our security (except our loss of faith in the CIA?). After all, it's whatever succeeded that would need to be kept secret, so that it could continue to work. You have to wonder... if they make enough stupid mistakes, and know they're stupid enough to be benign in regard to security, perhaps the CIA is somewhat smarter than we think. They know what they do wrong, then perhaps they know what they do right. They'll just never get credit for any of it.
Golly gee, I've refuted myself again.
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"And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion...." -- J.S. Mill
A whole bunch of people work for the CIA. They aren't all "sick fucks." If you don't like the cat thing, fine... but without "intelligence" we'd be a lot worse off than we are with it.
The CIA may do some distasteful things, but you can't condemn them all for that, and you are definitely enjoying some protection from the agency.
This is presumably working on the theory that nervous systems are fairly similar in all animals. So if you can work out how to make a cockroach tap-dance under computer control, then you can do the same for Christopher Reeve or other paralysed ppl (but presumably in this case under CR's control - just imagine some h4x0r getting root on CR's control box! :-).
You'd have real problems getting a grant to do these experiments on babies, or even on volunteers. Messing with nervous systems could (a) cause lots of pain, and (b) damage the nerves so that the person is paralysed. But with cockroaches, who cares? If it gets paralysed, squish it and move on to another one. Why roaches? Well, they're large insects, so presumably it's easier to trace the nerves. And I'd guess insects are easier to deal with due to their exoskeleton - if you need to attach something to an insect, you can glue it to the outside and be sure it won't come off. With mammals and reptiles, you've always got the problem of attaching stuff securely to skin. And of course, there's the PETA issue - pictures of cute fluffy mice in labs are good for publicity, but no-one's going to object to experiments on roaches bcos they're not photogenic!
Maybe you need to reconsider how medical research is done. Transplants were _not_ done on humans, they were done on chimps, rats, dogs, etc first.
Grab.