Homeland Security investing in Russian mind control research
September 20th, 2007 by PhilAgain, like Greg, I only wish I was making this shit up.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia’s capital. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study — dubbed psychoecology — that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research.
What’s gotten DHS’ attention is the institute’s work on a system called Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, a software-based mind reader that supposedly tests a subject’s involuntary response to subliminal messages.
SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen — like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The “player” — a traveler at an airport screening line, for example — presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist’s response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person’s, according to the theory.
Best part? This whole thing is being marketed to DHS by the Canadians, as a product called MindReader 2.0. Apparently the Canadians and the Russians have teamed up to catapult America completely into the plot of 1984.
Geoff Schoenbaum, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, had this to say. I think it pretty well sums it up.
Developments in neuroscience, he noted, are followed closely. “If we could do (what they’re talking about), you would know about it,” Schoenbaum said. “It wouldn’t be a handful of Russian folks in a basement.”