Full title: Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA spent about $15 million surgically implanting a microphone in a cat’s ear, a transmitter under its skin, and an antenna through its tail to spy on Soviet conversations

  • No1@aussie.zone
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    7 days ago

    Well, we tried training dolphins, and then sharks with frickin’ laser beams, but we couldn’t convince everyone to build a pool everywhere they were going…

      • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml
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        7 days ago

        In view of recent events, I find it difficult to believe ANYTHING our government says.

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          I don’t even think this was the government lying to the public. I think it was a CIA department lying to their superiors. Same with those CIA remote viewing experiments. Come up with a cover story that’s so embarrassing, the higher ups will bury it.

          • Sabata@ani.social
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            7 days ago

            Guys, let’s spend 15 million on LSD and a trip to the woods. Just put cat microphone on the paperwork or something, no one checks.

          • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml
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            7 days ago

            Yea, I think we’re on the same page.

            The CIA has been hiding what they do for a long time now. Your guess is as good as mine.

          • Aqivex@fedinsfw.app
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            7 days ago

            Do you really believe that the CIA “superiors” didn’t know about the cover up stories and their necessity to chaff the signals up and dilute all of the coups, human trafficking, narcotics empire building, and more realistic ineptitude based fuck ups with wacky zany stories about staring at goats?

            If so, their use of silly is working.

            • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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              7 days ago

              No, because I think every layer of the CIA thinks they know what’s best and that they shouldn’t have to answer to anyone, including their own boss.

              No, because I think secrets can stay safer the fewer people who know about them. The boss may have a general idea of what’s going on, but the less they know, the less chance there could be a leak from a Man In The Middle attack. The bosses probably have a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. They probably knew the cat story and remote viewing story were nonsense, but knew it was dangerous to know what’s actually going on and left it be.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        Yeah, the money went to Katianna the cleaning lady at the embassy and the story about the $15m spy cat was to cover up how they got the information.

    • betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      One was. What they don’t know is that the taxi was being driven by a cat who had been assigned the mission to preserve the secrecy of their own clandestine meetings.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 days ago

        What I remember is they tried to do a test run of whether or not it could hear two people stting and talking at a park bench.

        So, they released, from the safe house on the other side of the road from the park, it started to go toward the bench, and BLAM, hit by a car.

        EDIT:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty

        The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately.[4] However, this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and “the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards”.[5] Subsequent tests also failed.[1] Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.[6] However, other accounts report more success for the project.[7]

        … So… not exactly a high of certainty going on here.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      well, that’s just for spying. I still think ww2 was worse, when they would feed dogs under tanks, so that when deployed in the battlefield, the dogs with explosives strapped would get under enemy tanks and boom

    • NihilsineNefas@slrpnk.net
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      7 days ago

      I would advise not looking into the rest of the mkultra sub-projects then. They only get worse.

      Saying that, the one where they built fake brothels with one way mirrors to dose politicians with LSD and then get secrets out of them was objectively kinda funny, in a looneytoons way.

    • mobyduck648@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      That’s a normal workday for the CIA at the peak of the Cold War. Apparently getting dosed with acid was something of an occupational hazard in the '50s if you worked for the CIA which might explain some of their more unusual operations.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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    7 days ago

    A cat? Gaurenteed they are going to fuck up whatever plan you have in mind. They can sense what you want them to do and the fuck you part of their brain is instantly activated. Whomever thought this up knew jack about cats.

    • mobyduck648@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Yeah like not supporting this equipping animals with cybernetic enhancements nonsense, but did it not occur to any of them that dogs exist?

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Well… Let me tell you about Elon Musk, Neuralink, and the amount of primates dying every month because of the failure rate implanting a computer chip into a brain has.

    • FatVegan@leminal.space
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      7 days ago

      We do batshit animal abuse ideas a billion times a day. I don’t think these few cats would make a dent.

      • CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social
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        7 days ago

        I was gunna rhetorically ask why everyone on this platform feels the need to be so fucking negative all the time, when someone points out something positive, but then I saw your username. Just another obnoxious vegan who can’t keep it to themselves.

        So hey, thanks for ruining my positive thought. Really appreciate that.