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It was the period in the history of the United States known as Prohibition, from 1920-1933. During this time, the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcohol for consumption was banned throughout the US as mandated in the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Noble Experiment was a colossal failure.  As public use of alcohol was illegal, all drink was driven underground.  Syndicated crime sky rocketed, as the need to provide illegal liquor increased.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the “chemist’s war of Prohibition” remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was “our national experiment in extermination.”

Read the rest of the story at: The Chemist’s War (Slate)

Watch Prohibition – The Last War on Drugs

The worlds first real introduction to the atom was the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. What we witnessed was the raw destructive force of splitting the atom. In order to win us over to the peacetime uses of this technology the public needed to be educated.

A Is for Atom is a 14-minute animated propaganda film created by Sutherland Productions and paid for by General Electric.  The short explains what an atom is, how nuclear energy is released from certain kinds of atoms, the peacetime uses of nuclear power, and the by-products of nuclear fission.

Watch A Is for Atom

The United States was the only country producing  nuclear weapons until 1949 when the USSR tested its first nuclear device.  The perception of safety generated by US weapons superiority waned.  Soon the public began to think  that the US was more vulnerable than it ever had been.

The Federal Civil Defense Administration prescribed duck-and-cover exercises as a safety measure in case of a Soviet attack.  Quickly every American citizen, from children to the elderly, practiced to be ready in the event of nuclear war.

The movie Duck and Cover was produced for school showings.  It was thought that the main dangers of a nuclear explosion were from heat and blast damage.  It wasn’t until much later that we learned that the majority of damage from nuclear weapons is long term radiation contamination.  No amount of duck-and-cover will stop radiation poisoning. Sorry for the false hopes.

Watch Duck and Cover – US Federal Civil Defense Administration (1951)

There is a widely held belief that after the allied victory over Germany in WWII, the Nazis just went away. We never think about all of the Nazis that were never tried for their crimes. Sure there was a big trial at Nuremberg but the number tried was no where near the number of people it took to run Hitler’s war machine.

Thousands of Nazis simply went to work for the US Government. Scientists, intellegence agents, master tacticians, code experts, commuications experts, weapons engineers, and experts in mind control all joined the US Government payroll.

These new American employees were guilty of countless crimes during the war. Mass murderers and torturers had their crimes absolved and went right to work for Uncle Sam.  All of this was done behind the backs of the American people.

Watch The CIA and the Nazis

Wealthy industrialists, concerned with the failing US economy during the 30s, looked to Europe for guidance. Post World War I Europe was governed primarily by dictators. The success in Mussolini’s Italy was of particular interest. Mussolini’s reign was the product of corporate control of government, and under his leadership, the broken Italian economy leapt to its feet.

FDR, elected in the hopes of tackling Hoover’s Great Depression, was spending the US into obscene debt. The final straw was FDR’s retreat from the gold standard. Bankers and industrialists believed that a currency  not tied to real wealth would destroy the US economy.

Buoyed by the prospect of a corporate/government merger, some of the biggest corporate names in the US hatched a plot to overthrow the FDR government.

Watch The Plot to Overthrow FDR

All 6000 pages are available at: http://ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

School-issued laptops are becoming more and more common these days, but thanks to the action of one high school, students and parents might have second thoughts about bringing them home. The parents of a Pennsylvania high school student, Blake J. Robbins, have filed a lawsuit against his school district after discovering that school officials had allegedly been remotely accessing the laptop in order to take webcam photos of the students at home (via BoingBoing). There are a number of unanswered questions about this story, but if true, it could mean serious penalties for the Lower Merion School District.

According to the complaint, the school in question (Harriton High School) had issued laptops equipped with built-in webcams to every student so that they could have “24/7 access to school based resources” and the ability to work seamlessly between school and home when it comes to research and projects. In November of 2009, however, Robbins was disciplined by the Assistant Principal of his school, Lindy Matsko, for engaging in “improper behavior” in his home. At that time, Matsko cited a photograph from the built-in webcam on the laptop.

Robbins’ father Michael supposedly confirmed with Matsko that the school has the ability to remotely activate the webcam “at any time it chose to view and capture whatever images were in front of the webcam.” Needless to say, Robbins’ parents were outraged at this development, as neither the school nor the district had told parents about this capability. As a result, the Robbins have filed a class-action lawsuit against the district, charging it with interception of electronic communications under the ECPA, theft of intellectual property under the CFAA, violations of the Stored Communications Act, violations of the Civil Rights Act, invasions of privacy, and violations of the Pennsylvania wiretapping and electronic surveillance act.

Reporters tried to get clarification from Harriton High School about its laptop policy, but were told that no one at the school would be willing to discuss it. Merion School District has not responded to our requests for comment either.   As such, we’re left speculating as to what else could have happened to led up to this seemingly surreal series of events.

Read more at: Parents: school used webcam to spy on our kid at home (Ars Technica)

*Update: School District Halts Webcam Surveillance (Wired)

Equipment that jams cell phones will get its first federally sanctioned test inside a prison in Maryland this week, as state officials try to show Congress how the technology can prevent inmates from using the contraband devices to commit crimes, a governor’s spokesman said Tuesday.

The state wants to show the equipment can be used without interfering with emergency response and legitimate signals outside the prison perimeter, said Shaun Adamec, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s spokesman.

The Federal Communication Commission can only allow federal agencies — not state or local authorities — permission to jam cell phone signals. But a bill that passed the Senate and awaits action by the House would allow states to petition the FCC to block the use of cell phones from prisons.

Testing is set to begin Wednesday at the Federal Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Adamec said. The governor has strongly backed allowing states to use the jamming technology to battle the growing problem of cell phone use in prisons.

A bipartisan measure sponsored by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., was approved by the Senate in September. A companion bill is in the House.

“I think all of this can help Senator Mikulski in her efforts to pass a bill, and hopefully if the FCC sees it coming they might just do it by regulation,” O’Malley said.

The tests are being conducted to provide more information about the technology as the legislation is being considered.

Prisons around the nation have been trying to stem rising problems from prison inmates using cell phones to coordinate criminal activity from behind bars. Officials in New Jersey even intercepted a conference call among gang members from different prisons who were plotting retaliation against another gang member.

Read more at: Feds allow prison phone jamming test (Ap)

New Zealand Jams cell phones in prison – Jamming the phone in the cell (New Zealand Department of Corrections)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military, just awarded a $32 million contract to build an all-terrain quadruped robot that carry equipment into battle for our troops.

The contract has been awarded to Boston Dynamics, which has just 30 months to turn the research prototype machines into a genuine load-toting, four-legged, semi-intelligent war robot–”first walk-out” of the newly-designated LS3 is scheduled in 2012.

LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, and that pretty much sums up what the device is all about: It’s a semi-autonomous assistant designed to follow soldiers and Marines across the battlefield, carrying up to 400 pounds of gear and enough fuel to keep it going for 24 hours over a march of 20 miles.

Here is a video of  BigDog kicking it on a beach in Thailand.

LS3 is a direct descendant of BigDog, and it’ll be battle-hardened and clever enough to use GPS and machine vision to either yomp along behind a pack of troops, or navigate its own way to a pre-programmed assembly point. Yup, that’s right, LS3 is smart enough to trot off over the horizon all on its lonesome. That opens up all sorts of amazing military possibilities, like resupply of materiel to troops who are deployed in difficult remote locations, as well as the standard “If LS3 can offload 50 pounds from the back of each soldier in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops” as described by BD’s president Marc Raibert.

And its clear that these, and other, potential benefits have been proven to DARPA enough that it’s prepared to fund what seems to be an extremely future-focused piece of military hardware. But LS3, of course, stands for much more than its simple “squad support” label would suggest. It’s placing artificially-intelligent robots right next to soldiers on the battle field, which is a natural extension of the way robots are currently used in combat–essentially as smart remote control units for situations too dangerous for a human to risk. And in that sense, LS3 is a significant piece of kit. Because it won’t be too long before someone considers the benefits of replacing its 400-pound load with a heavy gun, and LS32 becomes an AI-equipped armed battlefield robot. More terminator-dog than K9, you see.

Here is video of  BigDog auto-tracking a human.

Stay tuned for: Drone Wars

According to the Tuesday edition of the French daily Parisian, a confidential military report proves that soldiers were deliberately exposed to nuclear tests that France conducted in Algeria in the 1960s.

Soldiers were deliberately exposed to nuclear tests conducted by France in Algeria during the 1960s to “study the physiological and psychological effects of atomic weaponry on humans,” according to a report exposed by the French daily Le Parisian on Tuesday.

The “confidential report”, entitled “The beginnings of the organization and experimentations in the Sahara” were drafted “by one or several military personnel” and “dated 1998” after the tests had ceased, according to Le Parisien.

An excerpt published in the newspaper refers to the “Gerboise verte”, code name for the test firings of April 25, 1961. It states that the experiment “should allow for a study of the physiological and psychological effects of atomic weaponry on humans, with the goal obtaining the necessary elements to prepare physically and morally for modern combat.”

Defence Minister Hervé Morin said in an interview with Le Parisien that he had no knowledge of this report, saying that he only become aware of it because of information that came to light during a trial in which victims’ families demanded reparations.”

He added, “The (radioactive) dosages received during the tests were very low. Nonetheless, he said, “10 million Euros have been allocated [for indemnities],” he added. “We can increase this figure if necessary.”

France conducted 210 nuclear tests in total, beginning with the one in the Sahara in 1960 and ending as late as 1996 in French Polynesia. Thousands of soldiers believe themselves to have suffered radioactive contamination, and have demanded justice.

Watch Video at: Soldiers deliberately exposed to nuclear tests, says report (France 24)

See also: Parliament approves compensation bill for nuclear test victims (France 24)