ACLU Seeks Information About Government Use of Brain Scanners in Interrogations

ACLU Seeks Information About Government Use of Brain Scanners in Interrogations (6/28/2006)

NEW YORK-- In the face of suspicions that the government is using cutting-edge brain-scanning technologies on suspected terrorists being held overseas or at home, the American Civil Liberties Union today announced that it has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with all the primary American security agencies.

"There are certain things that have such powerful implications for our society -- and for humanity at large -- that we have a right to know how they are being used so that we can grapple with them as a democratic society," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project. "These brain-scanning technologies are far from ready for forensic uses and if deployed will inevitably be misused and misunderstood."

The most likely technology to be used for anti-terrorism purposes is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which can produce live, real-time images of people's brains as they answer questions, view images, listen to sounds, and respond to other stimuli. Two private companies have announced that they will begin to offer "lie detection" services using fMRI as early as this summer. These companies are marketing their services to federal government agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, the National Security Agency and the CIA, and to state and local police departments.



The ACLU's FOIA requests were filed yesterday with the Pentagon, NSA, CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

"These brain-scanning technologies have potentially far-reaching implications, yet uncertain results and effectiveness," said Steinhardt. "And we are still in our infancy when it comes to understanding the underlying processes of the brain that the scanners have begun to reveal. We do not want to see our government yet again deploying a potentially momentous technology unilaterally and in secret, before Americans have had a chance to figure out how it fits in with our values as a nation."

The ACLU’s FOIA request is available online at www.aclu.org/privacy/gen/26031res20060628.html.

A video of an ACLU-sponsored forum featuring experts discussing the use of fMRI as a “lie detector” is online at www.aclu.org/future.

Pruitt-Igoe and the End of Modernity

Pruitt-Igoe

"The federally funded Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was designed by St. Louis architects George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki in 1951. It was thought to be the epitome of modernist architechture--high-rise, "designed for interaction," and a solution to the problems of urban development and renewal in the middle of the 20th Century. Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954 and was completed in 1956. Pruitt-Igoe included thirty-three, eleven story buildings on a 35 acre site just north of downtown St. Louis.

"These structures were no anomaly. Instead, the Pruitt-Igoe project was the product of a larger vision of St. Louis government and business leaders who wanted to rebuild their city into a Manhattan on the Mississippi. Other redevelopment schemes of the time, for example, placed middle- and high-income residents in buildings that actually rivaled Pruitt-Igoe in height and scale."

"There is, moreover, no evidence that redevelopment plans intended to make an all-black, all-poor enclave at DeSoto Carr, which had been a poor area housing both whites and blacks before it was razed. An early scheme would have produced a majority of middle-income black residents. The final plan designated the Igoe apartments for whites and the Pruitt apartments for blacks. Whites were unwilling to move in, however, so the entire Pruitt-Igoe project soon had only black residents." ("Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project," Alexander von Hoffman, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html)."

Old Man's River City Project

Old Man's River City Project Wiki entry

I am writing an entry for Buck Fuller's unique and monolithic housing project.

A deep sociological examination of this project does not dismiss the design as impractical on grounds of scale or cost but rather social readiness of the would-be inhabitants.

Also Fuller has an institute:

Buckminster Fuller Institute

Type O Negative: Love you to Death Lyrics

3. Love You To Death

In her place one hundred candles burning
as salty sweat drips from her breast
her hips move and I can feel what they're saying, swaying
They say the beast inside of me's gonna get ya, get ya,get...

Black lipstick stains her class of red wine
I am your servant, may I light your cigarette?
Those lips smooth, yeah I can feel what you're saying, praying
They say the beast inside of me's gonna get ya, get ya, get...

I beg to serve, your wish is my law
Now close those eyes and let me love you to death
Shall I prove I mean what i'm saying, begging
I say the beast inside of me's gonna get ya, get ya, get..

Let me love you too
Let me love you to death

Hey am I good enough for you?
Hey am i good enough for you?
Am I?
Am I?
Am I good enough
for you?

Networks, Cells, Revolutions

The Business of Terror: Conceptualizing Terrorist Organizations
as Cellular Businesses

A Formal Characterization of Cellular Networks

"A cell is a distinct subgroup of actors within a larger cellular network. The presence of at least one cell is fundamental to a network’s distinction of being cellular—without at least one cell, a network is not cellular. Empirically, a cell often consists of relatively few actors and has a distinct topology that is effortless to identify visually. The actors in a cell can be partitioned into two distinct but intertwined subgroups, namely the cell-core and the cell-periphery."

The Complexity of Terrorist Networks

QUANTIFYING INSURANCE TERRORISM RISK

"If the ideas of swarm intelligence are applicable to any group of human beings, it would be to zealous and fanatical terrorists, bound together as one by the Islamic bond of brotherhood; as absolute as that shared by blood relatives. Such a terrorist group could not be adequately represented simply as a set of single-minded individuals, espousing a common cause. Much of their special strength resides in the unusual qualities of their collective swarm intelligence, which govern the group’s fearsome capability of executing extreme acts of terror and escaping prior detection. "

Jericho 941

I like the 941 for it's clean lines and the simple, yet robust modernization of the CZ-75 which is itself a robust copy of the venerable Browning High Power.

Wiki had this to say about the 941,

"A modified version of the Jericho 941 was the weapon of choice for Spike Spiegel, protagonist of the anime TV show Cowboy Bebop."

Jericho 941

Gunweek article on Jericho 941

Gunweek Magnum Research Industries, the makers of the Baby Eagle

On matters relating to intellectual honesty

It has been said that this blog practices revisionism. This is nonesense. All loyal blog readers should do well to denounce the petty agitation efforts of anti-blog subversives.

Only the petty diletantism of a revisionist would him or herself stoop to such base accusations. IN the interest of good taste, all claims to the contrary will not be tolerated. Now close ranks and get back in line. There will be no defection from the status qou. This band marches on.



In _The Poverty of Philosophy_, Marx wrote:

"The working class, in the course of development, will substitute for the old bourgeois society an association which will preclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power groups, since the political power is precisely the official expression of class antagonism in bourgeois society." (p.182, German edition, 1885)

" The state is a special organization of force: it is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class. What class must the proletariat suppress? Naturally, only the exploiting class, i.e., the bourgeoisie. The working people need the state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat can direct this suppression, can carry it out. For the proletariat is the only class that is consistently revolutionary, the only class that can unite all the working and exploited people in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, in completely removing it."

-Lenin