Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Disinformation?
John St. Clair Akwei claims to have worked for the National Security Agency
(NSA) of the US government, and filed a lawsuit against them in 1992
(Washington DC, Civil Action 92-0449) for being targeted with what he
referred to as ‘Remote Neural Monitoring’ (RNM) technologies. Many people
have referred to this case as proof that these technologies exist, but on
closer examination it can be seen that there’s very little to actually
substantiate his claims. In fact, there is good reason to suspect that this case
was a deliberate disinformation ploy to create the illusion that the NSA has
more capabilities than it really does. This is a standard tactic used to throw
off foreign and domestic adversaries and protect classified secrets. This sort
of disinformation ploy is designed to create a prop that can then be used to
lead people’s beliefs about the capabilities of these technologies so that they
have a false understanding of the methods used in their targeting and the
real methods are overlooked.
Akwei states that he was in two-way communication with NSA agents who
used these technologies to harass him, but he provides very few other details
about his targeting beyond this and the majority of his application is filled
with background information about the NSA and some details about their
purported technological capabilities. Most of this information was already
widely available at the time he filed his lawsuit. The only information that
might have been relatively new at the time was a few of the more
extraordinary claims he made about the technology.
“Without any contact with the subject, Remote Neural Monitoring can
map out electrical activity from the visual cortex of a subject's brain
and show images from the subject's brain on a video monitor. NSA
operatives see what the surveillance subject's eyes are seeing.
Visual memory can also be seen.”
Like virtually every other person making such extraordinary claims about
these technologies (Tim Rifat, Jesus Mendoza, Robert Duncan, etc.), Akwei
fails to describe whatever method might be used that would circumvent all of
the problems that have been detailed in this document regarding remote
mind-reading technologies. He also fails to provide any sources for his
information other than a list of references to a number of books and
documents that he states he only discovered in 1991 after having notified the
authorities and getting no responsive action. This list seems to be the extent
of his evidence, and much of the references material is familiar to this author
and none of it bears evidence that would support Akwei’s more extraordinary
claims.
He also states:
But let’s consider this claim a little further, just to properly understand how
unrealistic it is.
There are approximately one hundred billion neurons in the human brain,
which means that just to capture one millisecond (1/1000 of a second, the
approximate time it takes for a neuron to fire) of brain activity for one
person, with only one byte allocated to each neuron, it would require about
100 gigabytes of storage space per millisecond. One second of monitoring
would require 100 terabytes (1 terabyte = 1,000 gigabytes). One hour
(3,600 seconds) of monitoring one person would require 360,000 terabytes
(360 petabytes, or 360 quadrillion bytes). Multiply this by the number of
people that Akwei claims are supposedly being monitored (hundreds of
thousands), and it becomes even more unrealistic. Of course, a single byte
per neuron is far short of what would actually be required, since it would also
be necessary to store and analyze information about each neuron, such as
what it does, what its state is, what other neurons it connects to (there are
approximately one thousand dendrites on each neuron that connect to other
neurons), its firing rate, etc. Each additional piece of information about each
neuron would multiply the storage requirements for each neuron by at least a
factor of two, but probably much more. On top of all this, there’s the
necessity of mapping all the meaningful neural firing patterns that are
decoded from a person’s brain activity, which would require even further
computer resources, both for doing the analysis and for storing the patterns
and information about their meaning. Even though far less than the full set of
100 billion neurons would ever be of interest in mapping or monitoring for
any particular type of pattern, the storage and analysis of a person’s brain
activity would still require extraordinary memory and storage capabilities.
To put this into better perspective, in August 2011, IBM was reported to have
built the largest storage array ever, with a capacity of 120 petabytes (120
million gigabytes). This would be about enough to store the complete neural
information for one human brain for about twenty minutes at most.
So we see that for Akwei’s claims to be true, there has to be a database for
each individual target that contains complete data on that person’s
recognized patterns, as well as storage capacities for every millisecond of
brain activity to be used for real-time monitoring while also analyzing the
person’s brain activity. This might easily require days, weeks, or even
months worth of recorded data during the preliminary pattern learning
phase. Not that this is completely impossible, but it needs to be kept in
perspective what Akwei is claiming, and what is realistic.
This is an important point to take note of, because it supports the fact that
the Robert Malech patent is also often cited as proof that these mind-reading
technologies exist, yet the fact that this patent is in the public records goes
directly against NSA procedures for keeping technological secrets.
Because many people have been referring to this particular patent as proof
that remote mind-reading technologies exist, I decided to search it out at the
US Patent Office website, and retrieved a copy of the original application (US
patent #3951134). The patent application was made in 1974 and was
granted in 1976. The patent application describes the technology as an:
The use of the word ‘remote’ can be deceiving when used in relation to such technologies, and
might mean nothing more than the distance of mere inches, as with SQUIDs in a MEG machine.
The Malech patent gives no indication of the distances that the described technology would be
expected to work at, but it does state the following (emphasis added):
“If the amplitudes of the two signals transmitted to the subject are
maintained at identical levels, the resultant interference waveform,
absent influences of external radiation, may be expected to
assume zero intensity when maximum interference occurs[.]”
This raises the problems that I outlined in earlier sections of this document –
that any extraneous electromagnetic interference arising between the source
and the target will disrupt the signals, and this interference is virtually
impossible to eliminate in an open environment. The greater the distance
between source and target, the more interference there will be to contend
with. This applies to both the transmitted signal and the returned signal,
doubling the problem of sending and receiving a reliable signal. But more
than that, the above quote also reveals the patent author only assumes that
the technology will work as expected.
These last two quoted statements clearly indicate that, at least at the time
that the application was filed (1974), there was no certainty that this
technology would work as described or even that specific brainwave patterns
could be determined, which suggests that a prototype of the technology was
never actually built and tested to see if it would do what the patent author
claims. According to the patent application process in the USA, such
requirements are not necessary as long as the technology or invention is
conceptually sound and based on known scientific principles.
One more thing needs to be understood that has to do with the patent
process. According to an explanation of the patent examination process
available on the US Patent Office website (emphasis added):
“As a rule the examiner will give to a claim its "broadest reasonable
interpretation consistent with the specification. […] [T]he words of
the claim must be given their plain (ordinary and customary)
meaning unless applicant has provided a clear definition in the
specification.”
Given this fact, a closer scrutiny of the Malech patent application will reveal
that certain distinctions in its wording – most specifically in the choice of
using the words ‘can’, ‘will’, and ‘may’ when and where they have been –
suggest that the application author clearly understood that certain key
aspects of this technology’s operation were only being assumed to work,
rather than being certain to. I will spare the reader from going over these
details of the application here, however, and will instead leave it to those
who are interested in verifying this for themselves to read the original patent
application available at the US Patent Office and carefully note how it is
worded to reflect certain assumptions were being made about its capabilities.
One final note about this patent. It was obviously of no interest to the
military or intelligence organs of the US government, otherwise it would have
been immediately classified and kept out of the patent records. The fact that
it received a patent grant relatively quickly and is in the patent records
implies that the military/intelligence organs had already researched this
technology and found it to be unworkable. That being the case, the Malech
patent may have been purposely planted in the public records as a prop for
later disinformation campaigns to mislead and confuse the targeted public
about the sort of mind-control technologies that are being used on them,
while other, more realistic methods of mind-control are applied without any
awareness of the target. Even if the Malech patent wasn’t purposely planted,
it has nonetheless become a misleading piece of information that has since
been frequently used as proof that this remote mind-reading technology
exists and can even do everything that John St. Clair Akwei claims.