Be Afraid: Cyborg Warrior Insects  

Bart at Energy Bulletin has included this piece from Nick Turse at TomDispatch in his latest collection of "Deep Thought" pieces - "Weaponizing the Pentagon's Cyborg Insects" - quipping "News items to whet your paranoia are usually the province of Big Gav (file under "tin-hat conspiracies"). The demise of projects such as these will be one welcome side-effect of peak oil.".

Believe it or not, I don't intentionally set out to monger fear or make you paranoid with my occasional tinfoil items - its partly a case of trying to consider all views on my various pet issues (especially ones that deviate - in these cases, far - from the mainstream), partly for entertainment purposes and partly because I think people should know about some of the stuff our out-of-control military industrial complex gets up to (something John Petersen also noted once in one of his "email from the future"'s - that particular link was in "The Shockwave Rider", which you should go and read if you haven't already).

Anyway - cyborg attack insects are old hat - Kevin at Cryptogon has done 'em plenty of times - I'm looking forward to the day when these things are fully fledged blogjects and the script kiddies start playing with them - a whole new take on "War Games" :-)

Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality, if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.

Right now, researchers are already growing insects with electronics inside them. They're creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. One day, the U.S. military may field squadrons of winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at U.S. military bases.

Today, many people fear U.S. government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with "bio weapons."

... "The people who build this equipment are always going to say that they're just building tools, that there are legitimate uses for them, and that it isn't their fault if the tools are abused," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Eckersley. "Unfortunately, we've seen that governments are more than willing to play fast-and-loose with the legal bounds on surveillance. Unless and until that changes, we'd urge researchers to find other projects to work on."

Some related video on Chinese experiments with robotic insects (don't watch it at work, whatever you do !).



From the same "Deep Thought" collection - An act of "biopiracy" 130 years ago enriched England and devastated Brazil. Sounds a lot like the story of introducing tea cultivation to India really, without the 20 odd million dead people.

THE THIEF AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
By Joe Jackson
Viking. 414 pp. $27.95

On June 10, 1876, a self-styled explorer and adventurer named Henry Wickham arrived at Liverpool with his wife, Violet, having sailed from Brazil. He hastened to London and the offices of the Royal Botanic Gardens, commonly known as Kew Gardens, where he immediately presented the director, Joseph Dalton Hooker, with a sample of the precious cargo he had brought: 70,000 seeds of "the valuable rubber known as 'Par¿ fine,' " its proper botanical name being Hevea brasiliensis, or simply hevea, as Joe Jackson refers to it in The Thief at the End of the World.

Wickham had committed, as Jackson writes in this excellent account of his life and its lasting consequences, an act of "biopiracy." He had stolen seeds native to the Amazon forest and made them available to imperial Britain for planting in its Asian colonies. Jackson writes:

... "Thirty-four years after Henry's theft, the British rubber grown in the Far East from Henry's seeds would flood the world market, collapsing the Amazon economy in a single year and placing in the hands of a single power a major world resource"