Last year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that it was seeking noninvasive ways “to achieve high levels of brain-system communications without surgery.” The techniques would “allow precise, high-quality connections to specific neurons or groups of neurons.”
The agency wants to create mind-controlled weapons of war, as it (vaguely) explained in two recent press releases.
To achieve this goal, DARPA recently formed a program called Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3).
DARPA wants soldiers to be able to control machines with their minds.
According to a press release published on May 20, 2019, the agency has awarded funding to six companies to support N3:
Battelle Memorial Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Rice University, and Teledyne Scientific are leading multidisciplinary teams to develop high-resolution, bidirectional brain-machine interfaces for use by able-bodied service members. These wearable interfaces could ultimately enable diverse national security applications such as control of active cyber defense systems and swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, or teaming with computer systems to multitask during complex missions. (source)
When the four-year program was announced last year, in a press release DARPA began by mentioning all of the positive things that brain-machine interfaces are being used for:
Over the past two decades, the international biomedical research community has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated ways to allow a person’s brain to communicate with a device, allowing breakthroughs aimed at improving quality of life, such as access to computers and the internet, and more recently control of a prosthetic limb. DARPA has been at the forefront of this research.
The state of the art in brain-system communications has employed invasive techniques that allow precise, high-quality connections to specific neurons or groups of neurons. These techniques have helped patients with brain injury and other illnesses. (source)
Sounds noble enough…until you get to the next line.
However, these techniques are not appropriate for able-bodied people. DARPA now seeks to achieve high levels of brain-system communications without surgery, in its new program, Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3). (source)
If you don’t find that chilling, keep reading:
“DARPA created N3 to pursue a path to a safe, portable neural interface system capable of reading from and writing to multiple points in the brain at once,” said Dr. Al Emondi, program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO). “High-resolution, nonsurgical neurotechnology has been elusive, but thanks to recent advances in biomedical engineering, neuroscience, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology, we now believe the goal is attainable.” (source)
They want this technology to be ready within the next few years.
DARPA wants to build brain-machine interfaces that match the performance of implanted electrodes but with no surgery whatsoever, in other words – and they want the technology SOON:
By simply popping on a helmet or headset, soldiers could conceivably command control centers without touching a keyboard; fly drones intuitively with a thought; even feel intrusions into a secure network. (source)
According to a report from IEEE Spectrum, “a DARPA spokesperson declined to comment on the amount of funding, but two of the winning teams are reporting eye-popping grants of $19.48 million and $18 million.” That report provides some additional details on the program:
Specifically, the program is seeking technologies that can read and write to brain cells in just 50 milliseconds round-trip, and can interact with at least 16 locations in the brain at a resolution of 1 cubic millimeter (a space that encompasses thousands of neurons).
The four-year N3program will consist of three phases, says Emondi. In the current phase 1, teams have one year to demonstrate the ability to read (record) and write to (stimulate) brain tissue through the skull. Teams that succeed will move to phase 2. Over the ensuing 18 months, those groups will have to develop working devices and test them on living animals. Any group left standing will proceed to phase 3—testing their device on humans. (source)
What could possibly go wrong?
What will this brain-computer interface technology really be used for?
DARPA’s press releases on N3 are fairly vague, and the inner workings of the agency are a bit secretive.
In November 2018, The Atlantic published an eye-opening report on DARPA. Here are a few disturbing excerpts, but I highly recommend reading the report in its entirety.
DARPA has dreamed for decades of merging human beings and machines. Some years ago, when the prospect of mind-controlled weapons became a public-relations liability for the agency, officials resorted to characteristic ingenuity. They recast the stated purpose of their neurotechnology research to focus ostensibly on the narrow goal of healing injury and curing illness. The work wasn’t about weaponry or warfare, agency officials claimed. It was about therapy and health care. Who could object? But even if this claim were true, such changes would have extensive ethical, social, and metaphysical implications. Within decades, neurotechnology could cause social disruption on a scale that would make smartphones and the internet look like gentle ripples on the pond of history.
Yet DARPA’s work to repair damaged bodies was merely a marker on a road to somewhere else. The agency has always had a larger mission, and in a 2015 presentation, one program manager—a Silicon Valley recruit—described that mission: to “free the mind from the limitations of even healthy bodies.” What the agency learns from healing makes way for enhancement. The mission is to make human beings something other than what we are, with powers beyond the ones we’re born with and beyond the ones we can organically attain.
Human enhancement became an agency priority. “Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future,” predicted Michael Goldblatt, who had been the science and technology officer at McDonald’s before joining DARPA in 1999. To enlarge humanity’s capacity to “control evolution,” he assembled a portfolio of programs with names that sounded like they’d been taken from video games or sci-fi movies: Metabolic Dominance, Persistence in Combat, Continuous Assisted Performance, Augmented Cognition, Peak Soldier Performance, Brain-Machine Interface.
The programs of this era, as described by Annie Jacobsen in her 2015 book, The Pentagon’s Brain, often shaded into mad-scientist territory. The Continuous Assisted Performance project attempted to create a “24/7 soldier” who could go without sleep for up to a week. (“My measure of success,” one DARPA official said of these programs, “is that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we do.”). Jacobsen suggested that darpa’s neurotechnology research, including upper-limb prosthetics and the brain-machine interface, is not what it seems: “It is likely that darpa’s primary goal in advancing prosthetics is to give robots, not men, better arms and hands.” (source)
DARPA has been trying to create supersoldiers with robotic technology for decades, as Daisy Luther reported in Robot Apocalypse: “With Artificial Intelligence We Are Summoning the Demon”:
Over the years, DARPA has invested billions into exoskeleton suits for ground troops. This wearable robotic system gives soldiers the ability to carry heavier objects, run faster, and even leap over large obstacles. (source) Imagine trying to take on an enemy (or rogue soldier) who basically has superpowers.
However, DARPA is not the only entity that is messing around with mind-machine melding. Several companies and neuro-engineers – including Facebook and Elon Musk’s Neuralink – are also developing brain-computer interfaces.
What do you think?
Do you think DARPA’s intentions are good, or that the agency has nefarious reasons for developing this technology? Do you think it could be exploited and used to cause harm? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
About the Author
Dagny Taggart is the pseudonym of an experienced journalist who needs to maintain anonymity to keep her job in the public eye. Dagny is non-partisan and aims to expose the half-truths, misrepresentations, and blatant lies of the MSM.
Anything and everything is possible. I don’t agree with mind controlled anything! It’s not safe. People’s minds Can play tricks on them.
I remember a story my husband told me many years ago. He was on a mission with some Kurds during the second gulf war. One of the Kurds told him about an incident that happened on the road to Kuwaiti during the first gulf war. A caravan of Iraqi military trucks were on their way to Kuwaiti when every last truck stopped immediately and everyone got out to pray to Ali. Everyone had heard Ali’s voice in their heads. What they did not see was the aircraft with a microwave on it which transmitted the voice they heard inside their heads. The entire convoy was fire bombed and later trucks came and cover them up in the sands. Do you remember the Navy contractor who was shooting on the navy base back east a few years ago? He kept saying he heard voices inside his head. They aren’t going to develop mind control, they got it! What do you think 5G towers will do?
You are 100% correct. They just want to try and legitimize what they already have for the public’s eyes.
There is so much more that we only get hints about.
Most likely already happening with smart tech, etc. How does a three year old have a very detailed nightmare about an older man in a yellow truck offering her treats and then putting her in a cage she can’t get out of? That’s TMI for a three year old! What will these CREEPS think of next?
It sounds like more MK Ultra to me.
The REAL question is: why do WE allow it?
Sane people recognize a standing army and independent, unaccountable surveillance by shadow rulers — to the people or the supposed “government” — is insanity and an irrevocable ticket to ever-escalating violations of individual human rights, compassion, morality and true justice, with an accelerating and increasingly blind and monstrous quest for domination of weaker peoples by that coterie of self-appointed rulers.
If, as the stupid herd maintains, “WE” explicitly outside of “government,” are in fact “the government,” how does this malevolent evil of untouchable hidden rulers even exist?
Sorry, folks, “elections” don’t change a thing, except to give yet more “permission” to the string-pullers under cover of “the majority of the people approve of and want whatever it is [TPTB] want.”
If “we” truly are “the government,” and we don’t actually like or approve of these war-mongering control freaks, then WHY do “we” allow them?
Are we already so far gone and helpless that there’s really nothing we can do about it?
How about surreptitiously joining and growing a movement to eliminate all taxes? Without extorting our labor and earnings, “they” could not do what they do. We would not need to be under any such monstrous machinations of anyone.
Do you really need to be ruled by someone else? Is it really MORAL and ETHICAL to “elect” others to rule over your neighbors and you? REALLY?
Exactly what kind of “chaos” could reign if we finally eliminated the absolute and total murderous chaos that governments inflict on all of us every day? It’s a matter of magnitude: there’s nothing of actual crime — violence, theft, fraud — local communities of neighbors, friends, and family cannot handle on such a small scale.
On the other hand, there’s nothing local communities can do about what “government” outside does to all of us.
DARPA can’t exist without our complicity and cooperation. None of the lethal embroilments we are at the mercy of could.
We CAN change that, if only we wanted to.
Who has a right to rule anyone else?
Who is qualified to rule anyone else?
Who says, and why?
Good always comes with bad. No matter what technology is developed that has the ability to make human life better, that same tech can always be used to make life worse for others. This is human nature it’s been going on for centuries. Why are you all of the sudden shocked to find that humans have found a ‘bad’ way to use a piece of tech as well as a good way?
The issue is what are you going to do about the bad? Just roll over and be dead?
William Blum put it quite well when he said: “No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.”
I am sure glad the gun was invented. It has filled the table of the week and the mild for centuries. and has been used by every government for good and bad. I am sure glad the automobile and petro engine has been invented. It has allowed the masses to commute further each day. And yet every government has used the same for good and evil. I am sure glad the airplane was perfected. We, the average citizenry, can visit family and friends worldwide. Tell me one country that does not rely on an airborne military.
There are always those who will fly planes into buildings, make car bombs, assassinated innocent people who just want to live their life tending their little corner of the world. It is why we need to bring calm and be at peace with those around us as much as possible. Some will hate us no matter what. Some will seek to destroy you and I; and that is why we must be vigilant.
EVERYTHING can be used for good and evil.
Let’s make sure our corner of the world, and our allies, can live without fear of tyrants.
Hmmmm. I wonder if this is the real reason for the government’s sudden interest in upgrading the (electrical) infrastructure of our country the potential problems caused by an EMP…..just saying.