The 'War On Terror' Becomes The War To Control Your Mind

'Psychotronics' is one of those weird Cold War-era Russian mind control conspiracies. Except it isn't.

There is a growing, multi-billion dollar industry taking root across the world focused singularly on finding ways to 'read' the human mind, from a distance, and, at the same time, to control the mind, to direct it, to influence human behaviour in a non-physical way. Naturally, the United States' involvement in pscyhotronic research is all to do with the 'War on Terror'. They're spending millions on R & D into mind control to stop terrorism. The 'Fight Against Terror' has become the greatest excuse of modern times for breaking through the final wall of human privacy - the right to think whatever you like, free of surveillance, or intrusion.

That right of free thought is now going up in smoke.

It's probably best you read this story for yourself.

Science fiction writer Philip K Dick used to believe in the early 1970s that Russian scientists were possibly bouncing energy beams off satellites to send information directly into his brain. It sounded ridiculous. This story makes PKD's theory sound, well, not so nuts. And that's a disturbing thought. I just hope it's my own :

The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.

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.

Marketed in North America as SSRM Tek, the technology will soon be tested for airport screening by a U.S. company under contract to the Department of Homeland Security.

"If it's a clean result, the passengers are allowed through," said Rusalkina, during a reporter's visit last year. "If there's something there, that person will need to go through extra checks."

This May, DHS announced plans to award a sole-source contract to conduct the first U.S.-government sponsored testing of SSRM Tek.

Igor Smirnov (was) a controversial Russian scientist whose incredible tales of mind control attracted frequent press attention before his death several years ago.

Smirnov...is called the father of "psychotronic weapons," the Russian term for mind control weapons. Bearded and confident, Smirnov in the video explains how subliminal sounds could alter a person's behavior. To the untrained ear, the demonstration sounds like squealing pigs.

In the United States, talk of mind control typically evokes visions of tinfoil hats. But the idea of psychotronic weapons enjoys some respectability in Russia. In the late 1990s, Vladimir Lopatin, then a member of the Duma, Russia's parliament, pushed to restrict mind control weapons, a move that was taken seriously in Russia but elicited some curious mentions in the Western press. In an interview in Moscow, Lopatin, who has since left the Duma, cited Smirnov's work as proof that such weaponry is real.

"It's financed and used not only by the medical community, but also by individual and criminal groups," Lopatin said. Terrorists might also get hold of such weapons, he added.

The slow migration of Smirnov's technology to the United States began in 1991, at a KGB-sponsored conference in Moscow intended to market once-secret Soviet technology to the world. Smirnov's claims of mind control piqued the interest of Chris and Janet Morris -- former science-fiction writers turned Pentagon consultants who are now widely credited as founders of the Pentagon's "non-lethal" weapons concept.

Smirnov died in November 2004, leaving the widowed Rusalkina -- his long-time collaborator -- to run the institute.

Despite Smirnov's death, Rusalkina predicts an "arms race" in psychotronic weapons. Such weapons, she asserts, are far more dangerous than nuclear weapons.

She pointed, for example, to a spate of Russian news reports about "zombies" -- innocent people whose memories had been allegedly wiped out by mind control weapons.

The U.S. war on terror and the millions of dollars set aside for homeland security research is offering Smirnov a chance at posthumous respectability in the West.

Smirnov's technology reappeared on the U.S. government's radar screen through Northam Psychotechnologies, a Canadian company that serves as North American distributor for the Psychotechnology Research Institute. About three years ago, Northam Psychotechnologies began seeking out U.S. partners to help it crack the DHS market. For companies claiming innovative technologies, the past few years have provided bountiful opportunities. In fiscal year 2007, DHS allocated $973 million for science and technology and recently announced Project Hostile Intent, which is designed to develop technologies to detect people with malicious intentions.

Larry Orloskie, a spokesman for DHS, declined to comment on the contract announcement. "It has not been awarded yet," he replied in an e-mail.

"It would be premature to discuss any details about the pending contract with DHS and I will be happy to do an interview once the contract is in place," Ioffe, of Northam Psychotechnologies, wrote in an e-mail.

Mark Root, a spokesman for ManTech, deferred questions to DHS, noting, "They are the customer."

Philip K Dick has long been written off as something of a wacko, by the uneducated and unenlightened, for some of the claims he made during the 1970s, in particular that Russian scientists were testing psychotronic weapons on innocent Americans.

Maybe he was speaking the truth, after all.

The 'War on Terror' is morphing into a war to control our minds and thoughts. It doesn't mean 'psychoecology' will actually work, but the Department of Homeland Security is interested enough to be spending money investigating the possibilities. That in itself should be a cause for concern.